Voting Machines and 'Calibration Drift'

An anonymous reader writes "Tuesday saw elections for school boards and city officials throughout Kansas. In Saline, ES&S voting machines in several locations were 'mis-calibrated,' and when the voter touched next to one candidate's name, the 'x' appeared next to another one. One person I talked to said he tried to vote three times before going to the 80-something-year-old election worker, who told him 'It was doing that earlier, but I thought I fixed it.' From the story in today's Salina Journal: 'The iVotronic machines used in Saline County are sold by Elections Systems and Software. In October, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law notified 16 secretaries of state, including Kansas Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh, that the machines are known to record votes to the wrong candidate.' The county does calibrate the machines the day before each election, but, '... in conversations with ES&S on Thursday, [the county clerk] was told that the calibration might change during the day. "What they've seen is calibration drift on a unit," Merriman said. "They're fine in the morning, but by afternoon they're starting to lose their calibration."' There was also coverage of the problems when they occurred two days ago."

A small victory against voting machines...

[Anonymous Coward]

...happened in Finland last week. A few municipalities tested electronic voting in the last (municipal) elections and when (unsurprisingly) irregularities occurred (232 votes were not counted properly), the results were challenged all the way to the supreme court, which now decided that the elections must be held again. The lawyer representing the appealing parties has said that he doubts that any politician will ever propose electronic voting in this country again.

That outcome is thus quite positive but it would've been even better if the minister responsible for it had accepted her responsibility and resigned like many people demanded her to.

So don't use touchscreens

[BiggerIsBetter]

Put physical buttons of to the side of the screen to press. How difficult was that?

And yes, the drift excuse sounds like B.S.

Call themselves engineers....

[hengdi]

Touchscreen calibration? I used to work for a company that built quiz machines and the like for the UK pub industry (circa 2000). Essentially they were simple PC's with a touchscreen (the monitor had a PS2 output).

We used to leave those machines running at various sites for YEARS, and I can't ever remember a calibration problem. And trust me, we'd know because when a customer starts to lose money they let the pub know about it all right. The biggest problem we had was the coin slot mechanism screwing up.

So now you're telling me that almost 10 years later and the calibration in a voting machine can't last A WHOLE GODDAMN DAY? That's service so bad it almost makes me believe in the conspiracy angle!

Re:Calibrate Per Use?

[conureman]

At the polling places I've worked, the (touchscreen) AutoMark machine (for voters with disabilities, &c.) marks a paper ballot, which is counted by the M100 scanner. After the polls close, we seal the marked ballots up in boxes which never get opened up unless there is a problem with the computer's count. The protocols (except for the software) seem fairly robust and transparent, and skeptics are welcome to watch. That's Contra Costa County, YMMV.

None of the touch screens I've EVER used...

[karlandtanya]

has this problem.

Granted, I've only been developing apps for them since about 1991, but I've NEVER seen any "calibration drift".

Heck, if the Client wants to "calibrate" them, I usually have to root around in the menus to find the CAL function. Touch the top right corner...

They just work.

What sort of cheap crap are the voters paying for?

Re:Wrong town name; it's actually 'Salina'

[ianweller]

Being someone who lives in Salina, I can vouch for that as well. Please fix.

Re:'Drift' sounds like a rubbish excuse

[sortius_nod]

You're talking about an 11 year old palm... not "state of the art voting machines".

Your Palm is well past it's used by date, these machines are supposed to be purpose built.

Re:Calibrate Per Use?

[tedshultz]

The calibration was so far off when I voted this week (on an ES&S automark), that I talked the election official about the calibration. More or less it is done the same way you used to with the palm pilot (touch 4 corners). The problem is that there is also some parallax issues as the screen is about 45 degrees off vertical. The result is the calibration can be a little off. A little off is fine and normal if the interface is good, but on the automark machines, they put the candidates names right next to each other so even a small error in calibration will result in the wrong candidate being selected. I took a video of my self voting, (it's here: http://shultzonline.com/vote/ [shultzonline.com] ). in the video is is clear that not the person I am pressing is selected, and that a candidate only 5mm away is selected.

Re:Calibrate Per Use?

[pmarini]

and how many times one has to calibrate a $300 PDA these days?
it's really abominable that these $A_LOT voting machines "forget" where a certain position on the screen is only after a few hours! it looks more a "feature" than a drift to me...
I'm growing tired of suggesting over and over the simple use of actual push-buttons (not on-screen ones) to go with the voting process (or to be considered for "manual override" use by the voter)...

Re:Calibrate Per Use?

[nametaken]

You assume the pencil is reliable. It isn't.

You ever seen a graded stack of scantrons?

Re:Unless this was the intented behavior...

[Rob the Bold]

Touch screens ARE analog devices and depending on technology may have to be calibrated. I'm sure that for a competitive bid situation they use the cheapest technology they can get away with. Does anyone know what ES&S are using?

They use commodity serial-interface touchscreens purchased through their Taiwanese parts suppliers. It's a transparent overlay on top of the LCD. ES&S uses a contractor with engineering in Kansas and Taiwan, a purchasing office in Taiwan and a factory in the Philippines. They don't do much of the actual engineering or coding themselves.

The touchscreen calibration routine runs once when the device is powered up and can be run again by anyone with the "supervisor ballot".

And Dreadneck, Smallpond and others are right, it is analog, and it can drift. The touchscreen and the display are separate components, and must be calibrated to work together. Changes in the environment like temperature can result in variation in the output from the touchscreen.

Re:'Drift' sounds like a rubbish excuse

[JorDan Clock]

I've worked around touchscreen point-of-sale equipment for a few years now, and during my own use of the POS screens and the use of others, I've never once heard of calibration being an issue on a screen, with the exception of a brand new, out-of-the-box screen. If these voting screens need calibration beyond their first start up, then they're doing something very wrong.

Calibrated the ALL the night before?

[ukemike]

Maybe this is an exceedingly small county, but if not I call BS on their claim that they calibrated them all the day before. I frequently work as an election worker. Because of this I get to witness first hand the logistical heavy lifting that goes into pulling off an election. It is far from easy. A typical single precinct voting location has 4-6 voting booths. Locations with multiple precincts might have 2 times that many. There are a few hundred precincts. So for a county that uses all touchscreen machines it would be reasonable to assume they have several hundred touchscreen machines, maybe over a thousand.

They are claiming that the day before, in addition to distributing the machines to the precincts and all of the other tasks, they booted up every one, and then ran it through the calibration routine? I don't buy it. I think they are in CYA mode. If they did really do it, I bet it was done by a volunteer who booted up 10 machines at a time then calibrated them all as fast as he could, and did a really lousy job.

At least in this case it appears to be a result of rampant incompetence. I am convinced that the Diebold machines are programed they way they to facilitate election theft.

Why even use machines

[cliffski]

Here in England we vote using paper and pens. The pens never need calibrating.
We don't understand why machines have any advantages at all. We never queue up to vote either.
I don't vaguely trust my vote to a piece of electronics. And I'm not a luddite, I'm a programmer.

These may be the screens mentioned in a lawsuit

[grandpa-geek]

There is a deposition from a lawsuit stating that, IIRC, either the screens or the machines themselves were manufactured in --literally -- a sweatshop in the Philippines. There was excessive heat and moisture. IIRC, the only testing was a shake test; they shook each product and if they didn't hear any loose parts it passed the test.

Our nation is founded on the principle that "...Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." Both the sellers and the buyers of these touchscreens are attempting to use cheap crap for implementing that principle, i.e., determining the "consent of the governed". Those who allow this to happen should be deeply ashamed.

Re:You Shouldn't Have to Calibrate Per Use

[Rob the Bold]

You shouldn't have to calibrate per use. My phone is a touch screen device and I use it all day. Since I've bought it over a year ago it never lost its calibration.

As an engineering problem, your phone has several advantages over a touch-screen voting machine.

• Size. Your phone's screen is an order of magnitude smaller in linear dimension and therefore two orders of magnitude smaller in are than the touchscreen on a voting machine. The cost of the voting machine's touchscreen is therefore much greater.
• Volume. Your phone is produced in far greater quantities than a voting machine. This results in cost savings through volume purchasing of its component parts. It also allows engineering costs to be recovered over a larger number of devices.
• Service Life. Your phone is designed for a service life of about 2 years, and probably won't be used that long due to obsolescence, loss, novelty wearing off, catastrophic damage, etc. A voting machine is expected to last much longer.

All these factors combine to give you much less "bang for your buck" in a voting machine than a phone. So when you ask,

How much do tax payers shell out for these pieces of shit? With that kind of cash floating around, and for something as important as voting, there shouldn't be stupid issues like this?

. . . you have to consider that these things are more costly than you think for a given quality of parts and design engineering. Also, the counties that buy the equipment have issues that are also as important as voting competing for funding. Many of these issues are more obvious every day, like fire and police protection, so it's hard to argue for extra expense for higher quality voting machines if it means one less fire truck.

Suggesting a calibrate per use is ignoring the root the problem.

You're right, but it's not just the calibration. I would argue that electronic voting machines as we know them today are just too expensive to design and build, and that the compromises we must make in quality and reliability to achieve affordability are too great.

Re:Calibrate Per Use?

[bongomanaic]

This already happens - the UN observes US federal elections indirectly through a mandate to the OSCE (http://www.osce.org/odihr-elections/14676.html). Each time they report that US elections are generally free and fair, and each time report the same defects that need to be addressed: Lack of transparency in electronic voting, inconsistent registration procedures, disenfranchisement of felons and DC residents, gerrymandering, burdensome ballot access requirements, conflicts of interests for election officials, and that in some areas voters party affiliation is made public.

rofl@conureman's responders

[hdon]

Did no one detect the sarcasm? You're all a bunch of tools.