Public Clearinghouse Proposed For Evoting Failures

Hugh Pickens writes "Alice Lipowicz writes in Federal Computer Week that Lawrence Norden, senior counsel to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, has reviewed hundreds of reports of problems with electronic voting systems during the last eight years. He is recommending a new regulatory system with a national database, accessible by election officials and others, that identifies voting system malfunctions reported by vendors or election officials and new legislation that requires vendors report evoting failures to the clearinghouse. 'We need a new and better regulatory structure to ensure that voting system defects are caught early, officials in affected jurisdictions are notified immediately, and action is taken to make certain that they will be corrected for all such systems, wherever they are used in the United States,' writes Norden. Adding that election officials rely on vendors to keep them aware of potential problems with voting machines, which is often done voluntarily and that voting system failures in one jurisdiction tend to be repeated in other areas, resulting in reduced public confidence and lost votes."

Re:Why even bother?

[cappp]

Cost. That's most likely the driving force. It's hard to find accurate numbers on a federal level but I stumbled across, what I think is, small town [maysville-online.com] coverage of a local special election which included some data:

The Senate election cost Lewis County approximately $22,000

State regulations require each precinct to have at least four workers on election day. Workers in Lewis County receive $115 for their work, including mileage and training costs, according to Lewis County Clerk Glenda Himes. That salary varies from county to county. The state mandates a minimum pay of a $60 salary for election workers. In addition to the four required workers per precinct, two additional people work in Lewis County's Tollesboro precinct because it is the largest precinct in the county, according to Himes. That adds up to approximately $6,670 just to pay workers the day of the election in Lewis County. Carter County is required to have 92 workers for its 23 precincts but also hires a few extras. Each worker receives $25 for attending the mandatory training session as well as $125 for working election day, totaling $150 per worker. That's a minimum cost of $13,800 for the county.

Now apply those kinds of figures on a larger scale - perhaps to NY or even on the federal level. Being able to cut the staff requirements in half by using computers is a tempting goal for cash-strapped areas. Throw in an obsession with the appearance of relevence, a need to differentiate the current administration from those previous, the desire to appear at the front of the technological wave, a lack of transparency from the involved companies, budgetary pressure, and some genuine well-meaners and you have your reason right there.

In Canada the cost of their 2004 election included [www.cbc.ca]

Election delivery activities, including fees to election workers and poll officials, printing lists of electors, and renting offices of returning officers and polling sites:$108 million

. Then you've got the expensive of printing the ballots, packaging, delivery, counting...it adds up.

distrust

[circletimessquare]

there is trusting too much in this world: a sort of gullibility to someone because you look too much at certain shallow easily manipulated signifiers of what a trustworthy person should be (like: wear a suit)

then there is genuine trust or genuine distrust coming from someone with a competent intelligence: a wise wariness, an awareness of what you lack in knowledge of a person, an emphasis on looking at what they say and what they have done in the past: sound judgment leading to an appropriate trust level

then there is this sort of pathological distrust, the mirror image of gullibility. where even those who are good people are cast in doubt, due to blanket statements about things you don't know, prejudice, mindless negativity, and a dim perceptive ability. all of which are on display in your comment above

there are people in this world who trust too easily, and there are people who trust too hard. both of which being character failures due to psychological imbalance and/ or intelligence defect. you are such a person

Re:threat

[Sir_Lewk]

Didn't Brazil manage to pull off an election with 128 million votes, and zero miscounts?

No. They had an election and the people in charge of it claim there were no miscounts. The distinction is important.

With electronic voting machines, in the best of all possible circumstances (open source code) only a very small portion of the population is able to truly understand and verify it, and an even tinier portion of people are able to verify that the code that's available to the public is actually the code that is running on the machines when voters use them. The people who are in the position to verify that either A) have absolutely no idea how to do so, or B) are the people who would have installed the incorrect software in the first place.

If you make the machines output a physical copy of the vote which the voter then verifies then the situation is improved, but with a purely electronic voting system the entire thing is FUBAR.

Re:How is a Diebold machine like a Pakistani citiz

[Anonymous Coward]

See, but academia has fairly solid proposals for machines that DO leave traces and that DO let voters verify votes. Better anonymity and transparency than now at a ballot box. Its just that somehow only shoddy adaptations of pure banking-type of systems (which only give a sysadmin or even only the creator's company some real insight into what's going on, not voters) are being employed.

In reality, academia thinks (and I think) that electronic voting machines could be quite strongly accountable, with better anonymity as well as transparency than current paper-based voting.

Re:How is a Diebold machine like a Pakistani citiz

[fruviad]

I used to be a deputy director at a board of elections in Ohio. The county used Diebold machines.

These systems are drastically more expensive than the older method of voting; there is absolutely no cost savings, whatsoever. It is not uncommon for poll workers to break the systems because of their ignorance or carelessness in working with the hardware. A broken Diebold voting system is VERY expensive to correct. The old systems? Cheap as dirt and easy to replace.

The likelihood of a major problem is far greater with the Diebold systems than with the older stuff. Trying to get octagenarian poll workers to successfully use hardware that they've used only a few times ever, and with little training 6 weeks prior to the election? Yah...good luck with that.

And uniformity across counties using the hardware? Hah! In the county where I worked, one single individual wrote software to "assist" in tallying the votes. I have no idea what the software did because he refused to document the software, and he refused to comment his code EVER. After he left the office he CONTINUED TO UPDATE THE SOFTWARE. I tried to figure out what it was doing by staring at the code, but that's tough when the code changes every day and the author refuses to explain even the broad outlines of how it works.

I could go on and on...but you get the idea.

Re:Or the US could just use a paper and pencil

[Shakrai]

I'm a poll worker in New York State and familiar with our system. To address a two of the points in that article:

Some polling sites did not receive the optical scanners needed to read paper ballots by 6 a.m., when voting was supposed to begin.

This is a logistical problem, not an indictment of the new voting technology. Any technology (including pen and paper) is rendered moot if the people in charge of it can't get it deployed on time.

At other polling places, the scanners failed to operate properly when they were switched on, forcing voters to wait while election workers struggled to get the devices going.

The poll workers were not properly trained. We have emergency (pen and paper) ballots on hand for this contingency. If they couldn't get their machines running for whatever reason they should have started issuing these ballots as soon as the polls opened. There is no excuse for requiring a voter to wait. This is a human capital problem and one that can only be addressed by recruiting better people to serve as poll workers. Have you considered volunteering to be one?