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United States Government Politics

Counting Glitches In Washington Governor Race 157

Posted by timothy from the some-votes-more-equal-than-others dept.
Fjornir writes "With 19 votes currently seperating the challenger from the incumbent in Washington state's race for governor, local news sites sites are reporting more glitches in the process for counting votes. This one, which has been described alternately as 'computer problems' and 'human error' as I've watched the story unfold, caused 6,200 ballots to be counted twice. This raises the question -- how many 'isolated incidents' are there going to be before we admit we have a 'real problem' on our hands?" Votes must be certified today, and a difference of less than 2,000 means an automatic statewide recount. If the difference is less than 150, that recount will be by hand (which is hard for the voting machines that have no paper trail). Update: 11/18 05:46 GMT by P : One candidate finished with a lead of 261, so the statewide recount will not be by hand, and should be completed before Thanksgiving.
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Counting Glitches In Washington Governor Race More

Counting Glitches In Washington Governor Race

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  • Damn (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @11:45AM (#10842344)
    I flippantly voted for the Republican because I didn't think a Republican had a chance of winning in Washington. That was stupid. My vote really counted this time, and I wasted it.

  • We already have... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Singletoned ( 619322 ) <singletoned@gmail.com> on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @11:52AM (#10842408) Homepage
    "how many 'isolated incidents' are there going to be before we admit we have a 'real problem' on our hands?"

    Well I'd say 'we' already have admitted we have a problem on our hands...
    • I'm not sure I fully understand your comment. If your "we" refers to the collective Slashdot crowd, then yes, I'd say for the most part we've admitted there's a problem.

      However, I do not think the United States at large has admitted there is a problem. Information like this isn't common place on local or national news programs, or it is buried deep in the newspaper. Sure, the information is out there, but most people don't go searching for this and most common people do not read slashdot, etc.

      Perhaps if

  • Various comments (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Antony-Kyre ( 807195 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @11:53AM (#10842423)
    I am a Washingtonian, and I voted. Let me voice my opinion of the problems.

    Yes, it's a problem when you accidently count votes twice. The 93% voting turnout should have been the first red flag of the human error.

    The race wouldn't be so close if they simply allowed IRV or Rank Choice Voting. I voted for Ruth Bennett, and would have chose Chris second.

    And I find it very funny that we might have to wait until Christmas to finally find out the final results.

    • Re:Various comments (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Rev Wally ( 814101 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @11:59AM (#10842492) Homepage
      The 93% voting turnout should have been the first red flag of the human error.
      A 93% voter turn-out should be standard operating procedure. But, unfortunately in this country, it is a red flag.
      • The 93% voting turnout should have been the first red flag of the human error.
        A 93% voter turn-out should be standard operating procedure. But, unfortunately in this country, it is a red flag.

        When people talk about red flags and red states, the first thing that pops into my mind is Communist countries.

        so as John Ashcroft sings, 'Let that eagle soar...'

    • Re:Various comments (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Shakrai ( 717556 ) *

      The race wouldn't be so close if they simply allowed IRV or Rank Choice Voting. I voted for Ruth Bennett, and would have chose Chris second.

      I'm sorry but I simply don't see why IRV is all the jazz here on Slashdot. Is there something inherently wrong with forcing people to make a hard decision on the voting booth? If you really like the Greens/Libertarians so much then vote for them. If the prospect of another two/four/six years of [evil party] scares you so much then vote for the front-runner who mos

      • The problem is that people will make the easy decision with the current system and just vote Dem/Rep.
        • You're right. Without third party candidates, nothing will keep the top two in line.

          IRV (also RCV) or Condorcet, or nearly anything else, is better than our current plurality system. IRV would simply be nothing more than having multiple primaries at once, elimanting the weakest candidate each time.
          -
          Here's how the election will be happening in the following years in Washington State. We'll have a primary, in which anyone can vote for any specific candidate they wish. The top two plurality candidates will en

          • Re:Two party system (Score:3, Informative)

            by pudge ( 3605 ) *
            No, this will not be how the next primary will be. That is what I-872 says, which passed, but I-872 is clearly unconstituional, according to Scalia writing for the majority in California Democratic Party v. Jones (2000):

            In no area is the political association's right to exclude more important than in the process of selecting its nominee...[who is] the party's ambassador charged with winning the general electorate over to [the party's] views. The First Amendment reserves a special place, and accords a spe

            • Interesting idea, that. Of course, the fact that Louisiana has been using this system for decades (well, longer than I've lived there) seems to contradict your theory.

              Note that we don't open up our Primaries to anyone, we just don't have Primaries, per se. Anyone who wants the office can run (five Dems and two Reps this last Senate race, I think), if noone gets a majority (not plurality) of the votes, top two, regardless of party, go to runoff in a month.

              • Interesting idea, that. Of course, the fact that Louisiana has been using this system for decades (well, longer than I've lived there) seems to contradict your theory.

                Even if this court ruling applied, it was in 2000, and the Louisiana primary has not (yet) been challenged in federal court. That said, the Louisiana system is very different, and so it wouldn't apply.

                The WA primary had been challenged in federal court, and it lost, just last year. It will lose again.
                • I'm curious. Exactly how is it different, other than a few labels?

                  We have an election, top two vote getters go to runoff.

                  you have a primary, top two vote getters go to election.

                  I don't know anything abuot the WA system other than what is posted here, so I'd like to learn why your's is bad, and our's is good (and has survived court challenges, as I recall).

              • Yeah, we were "sold" the idea that we were voting for the same system used in Louisiana, but as you point out Washington's new system is NOT like Louisiana's. In Washington we will now have an open primary, with the top two vote getters moving on to the general election, regardless of party.

                I pray this nonsense is overturned by some "activist" judge.

                • Re:Two party system (Score:3, Informative)

                  by pudge ( 3605 ) *
                  Yeah, a guy who ran (and lost in the primary) for the Republican nomination Congress in my district told me a couple days ago that he could not in good conscience support overturning I-872, because it is the will of the people, and that would be judicial activism.

                  I say, bullocks.

                  Judges are there to strike down unconstitutional laws. That's part of their job. I am as against judicial activism as anyone, but this is not activism, it's the job description.
                  • I am as against judicial activism as anyone, but this is not activism, it's the job description.

                    So you only oppose "judicial activism" when they rule against your position? I don't believe judicial activism exists. It is a term coined by the Republican majority to attack the rulings supporting the separation of church and state, the right to choose, marriage for all, and any constitutional right that the Bush administration wants to suspend during "the war on terror."

                    Much as I oppose the amendments t
                    • So you only oppose "judicial activism" when they rule against your position?

                      Uh ... no.

                      I don't believe judicial activism exists.

                      I don't believe you exist.

                      There are many clear examples of justices doing what they think is "right" or "best" or "fair" in direct contravention of the law. Just because some people choose to use the phrase to apply to every ruling they disagree with, that doesn't mean the phrase is meaningless.

                      One example is in this particular story: last Friday, King County Superior Court
                    • This is judicial activism.

                      I see where you are coming from now, but I just don't agree with you. Judges are human, and they can make bad judgement calls. The issue is that they aren't currently elected, but rather they are appointed, which takes away alot of their accountability. I don't know if there is a clear solution to this problem. I don't really think judges should be elected officials, because democracy is mob rule, and mob rule is terribly unjust.

                      Ultimately a judge is supposed to uphold ju
                    • I see where you are coming from now, but I just don't agree with you. Judges are human, and they can make bad judgement calls.

                      I am not talking about mere mistakes, or simple differences of opinion. The law here was very clear, and he chose to read it differently than it was written. This is not the best example -- there are better ones -- because we cannot be absolutely sure about what went on in his head (and motive is integral to charges of activism). But it was the most appropriate to the current di
                    • Heh, no. Dean Lum was elected, as most judges are in WA.

                      My mistake, I obviously don't know much about state politics. I retract all of my previous statements on the matter. That said, if he is an elected official this is hardly an issue at all. Just don't vote for him next time.
                    • From what I remember form my schooling, the executives (governors, presidents, mayors) carry out/enforce the laws. The legislature makes the laws. As for the judicial branch, I forget exactly what their job is, but we all know what it is.

                      Election of judges: In my opinion, perhaps we shouldn't use the plurality method to elect judges. Perhaps STV, Single Transferrable Voting, should be used, or something that allows a better proportional representation to prevent the tyranny of the majority.

                      Arson and murde
                    • The job of the justice system is simple: to settle disputes according to the law. Period. Early on, Marshall established that this necessarily included deciding whether a law violated the Constitution. But in all cases, the point was and must remain the law, not some arbitrary sense of justice or fairness.

                      Voting method: plurality voting is here to stay, thankfully. I don't even consider alternatives because it's a waste of time, and antithetical to republicanism (which the Constitution guarantees).
            • It can happen. Consider the below. The top plurality winner of each party went onto the general election. Let's say we used those results as if we had the Louisiana top two primary. Two Democrats would go on. Ignore the fact the below results are skewed due to forced partisan voting. Ironically Senn lost in the general election (negative ads I think hurt her).

              http://www.king5.com/election/results.html?attorn e ygeneral [king5.com]

              Deborah Senn (D) 332,705 50.7%
              Mark Sidran (D) 323,189 49.3%
              Rob McKenna (R) 305,258 78%
              • Right, you have to look at blanket primary results to get a better indication of what would happen. These results are not relevant. Apart from the fact that many Democrats would have voted for McKenna in a blanket primary, I voted for Vaska, but I would have voted for McKenna if we had a top-two system, as many (most?) of the Republicans who voted for Vaska would have.
          • Where do you live? Out here in District 5 it'll be two Republicans. If you look at the map you'll see Washington is mostly "red", with just enough "blue" folks in Seattle to tip the overall balance toward the dems. I predict most elections will have two Republicans, except in Seattle. Statewide it will be one of each. Libertarians and the other "3rd" parties are screwed.

            Naturally, you can only get justice in America if you have money, so since I'm poor (our household income is under $100,000, which makes us

            • I predict most elections will have two Republicans, except in Seattle.

              I talked to my state Senator, who voted for the top two system in the legislature. She said that only a very small handful of races would end up single-party, based on looking back at actual results of the blanket primary over the years. So I predict this would not happen in most elections. :-)
              • Ah, but the new system changes everything. Before, a strong potential candidate would not even run in the primary against an incumbent of their own party. Now, they might, because they have a good chance of getting on the ballot along with the incumbent. In my district the Republican always wins, so there's no point in anyone running against the incumbent -- the Democrats won't win, and the Republicans are fighting an uphill battle. Under the new system it won't be The Republican Incumbent vs. The Democrat,
                • But it won't be the norm, unless the person was going to run unopposed anyway, in which case what's the difference?

                  Anyway, it will get overturned, so who cares? :-)
                  • I think you missed my point. Today they essentially are running unopposed, as no Democrat has a snowball's chance in hell of getting elected in this District and no Republican is going to spend money to run against an incumbent. In this new system, a Republican challenger no longer has to beat the incumbent to reach the general election, they only have to beat the Democrat -- and if they can't beat the Democrat in this District, they aren't much of a Republican.

                    Why do this? Name recognition. The incumbent h

                    • No, I didn't miss your point. I am saying the incumbent is going to win anyway, so it doesn't make much difference. Oh sure, you could get some name recognition, but you could do that by running in the primary, too, and that swings both ways: losing maybe gives you name recognition, but not always the best kind (cf. Dick Gephardt in Iowa).

        • The problem is that people will make the easy decision with the current system and just vote Dem/Rep.

          Did it occur to you that might just be the way they wanted to vote? I'm sure you didn't mean like this but that statement sounds like "I don't agree with the way most Americans vote so let's change the system".

          Until you address the underlying problems I talked about above (mainly media access) IRV won't make a damn bit of difference. And we have bigger problems then our winner-take-all single-vote syst

          • No, I really don't think so.

            If given the option (and educated about party platforms), most Republicans would split between the current Constitution Party (evangelicals), current Libertarian Party; the Republican party would retain some moderate economic liberals. The Democrats would split between current Green Party, some would go to the Socialist/Communist Parties and the rest would form their various Social Democrat Parties; some would go to the remaining Republican Party.

            .

          • Did it occur to you that might just be the way they wanted to vote?

            I'm sure it's the way they wanted to vote, but why did they want to vote that way? I'm sure most people want to buy Crest or Colgate, but there are other toothpates out there if you'd take the time to look. Well, there were other toothpastes out there until Crest and Colgate took over. Oh, sure, there's the minor third-party toothpastes (I use Sensodyne and occasionally Tom's), but if you shop at Costco or Target you basically get the Big

      • IRV has many of the same problems as simple majority vote, which basically boils down to one thing - the need for strategic voting

        TMV (true majortiy voting, AKA Condorcet) allows voters to vote how they really feel and not have to worry about whether voting for z instead of y, when they really want y, will come closer to giving them the benefits they want. TMV does suffer from one of the same drawbacks as IRV - it requires rank-ordering and hence is a little more difficult to understand, but it's much ea

        • Again, the important thing is to remove the need for strategic voting.

          I suppose then that I would disagree that we need to remove strategic voting. In theory (Duyba doesn't support this theory but Clinton did) it should pull the politician towards the center to appeal to more voters.

          In the end game analysis all voting is strategic. Unless you are running for office yourself then you aren't going to agree with 100% of any candidates views anyway. So what's the problem?

          • There's a difference between stategic voting and strategic campaigning (or strategic misrepresentation - which both (all?) parties are guilty of).

            Also, as any good statistician can tell you, the definition of the word "center" is debatable. Do you mean the mean, median, mode, or some other statistical measure? Median probably comes closest to what the current system does, but I think TMV might tend to cause politicians to move more towards the mean - although don't ask me to back that up with more than ha

      • Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't think it's REQUIRED that you make a second or third choice... it's certainly not required for you to make a first choice!

        If you want John to win, vote for him. If you DON'T want Tim to win, don't vote for him. You are not obligated to choose a candidate you absolutely hate as a 2nd choice. (Unless you're Australian, I hear...)

        And based on the description of the electoral fusion thing, I don't see why the two are mutually exclusive. It would just be redundant in s
      • I realize this isn't the same as electoral fusion, but look at what Paul Richmond did. He unofficially dropped out of the attorney general race in Washington State, then endorsed Deborah Senn. He did this cause Sidran lost the primary.

        http://richmond4ag.com/ [richmond4ag.com]
      • Is there something inherently wrong with forcing people to make a hard decision on the voting booth?

        Yes, the sheer unnecessary waste of it. With a rankings or ratings ballot, there's no need to compromise and there's no vote thrown away.


        I'm surprised to see this response. I haven't meet many people who don't want to have a more expressive ballot.

    • The race wouldn't be so close if they simply allowed IRV or Rank Choice Voting. I voted for Ruth Bennett, and would have chose Chris second.

      That's speculation; you can't know that most Bennett voters would have voted Gregoire second. That said, I think you're probably right, and I'm glad the system is the way it is, not only because I campaigned for Rossi, but because I think IRV and Rank Choice are stupid. Cast your vote and live with it.
    • [IRV or RCV]

      That's backwards thinking: we can't get a handle on it now, so we should make it more complicated?

      Generate paper ballots however you want - sharpie-and-paper, hanging chad, Diebold, it really doesn't matter as long as the voter can see, before they put it in the box, that their choices are marked how they expected.

      Then count the paper ballots electronically. It's faster and generally more reliable than when people do it.

      Take a random sample of the original ballots from each precinct

  • You know I'm not perfect I create errors all the time. That is why we have test users and a nice long development cycle, we don't expect my first draft of a program to run right out the blocks. Now normally these election officials have 2 weeks to find out all the problems that happened and fix them. The scarier thing would be if the problem was never found, intentionally. We need to lay off and let the officials do their job, they don't even get paid good enough to be critizied the world over for not d

  • India stop laughing, it is not nice (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @12:12PM (#10842621) Journal
    Geez, India got over billion people a lot of who can't read or write, is piss poor, is at war with itself and its neighbours and yet seems somehow to manage to do an election without to much trouble.

    I propose a new voting system.

    • Everyone who pays taxes and is not currently in jail for a certain level of crime can vote. Political crimes like being arrested during a demonstration do not count for reason I hope are obvious. Crimes wich remove the vote can only be passed with a 99% majority.
    • Everyone who has the right to vote MUST vote. (Those who claim that Bush won the popular vote this time are idiots. The vast majority of americans did not vote for him. Just count number of votes for bush vs Total americans - bush voters. It is a problem all over the world btw not just america)
    • Add an option of "none of the above" if this reaches a certain percentage then the election must be held again. Three times and you have hold a revolution.

      Each person goes to a polling station in their county where they identify themselves through their identity papers. A mark is made on the paper as well as the person. This mark is made in such a way it cannot be removed. People who have voted are secluded. For one day every four years the country shutsdown. No double voting. No travel.

    • The voter is handed a ballot and directed into a closed of area.
    • The vote is done on a very simply laid out piece of paper. A mark is made with a pencil. Those who are blind or otherwise unable to fill it in on their selves can be helped by volunteer sworn in people from an another country, under no circumstance is anyone from america allowed to be in the same booth.
    • The piece of paper is handed by the voter to a group of checkers who are secluded from the outside world and cannot identify the voter through any means. They check the ballot if it is correctly filled in.
    • Depending on your hatered of stupid wrongly filled in ballots are either discarded and the voter asked to do it again or discarded and the voter is shot.
    • The checkers press a button on the counting machine. This relays wich vote is going to be recorded to the voter through a light. If correct the voter commits the vote.

    You know have three checks. The voter does the first check of course. The checker does the second and the voter checks the checkers has read it right. You now have the count on the counter wich can be so simple there is no way to cheat. it can be a pure mechanic device with the mechanism open for checkers to see (not for everyone to see or else you could see by the turning wich vote a person has cast. You also got a paper trail wich you know only contains correct votes.

    The current system fails for two reasons. people can cast the wrong vote or unclear votes. This should be eliminated.

    A vote should always be assured to be 100% accurate. Start adding interpretation to how each ballot was cast and you get the america of today.

    Sure sure, most of this is to extreme to pass but at the moment democracy in the west is becoming a joke. And no not just america. The netherlands is busy tearing itself apart with a totally ineffective goverment style wich policy has and continues to be to wait things out and hope they go away on their own.

    Remember that while we are stuggling with democracy China is marching on without all this mess. Yes democracy is "better" but is this really democracy or just a charade? When the majority of adults have a leader they did not vote for? When election result after election result turns out to be wrong?

    • Depending on your hatered of stupid wrongly filled in ballots are either discarded and the voter asked to do it again or discarded and the voter is shot.

      How about this: Keep the ballot, but discard the voter.

      How Darwinian!

    • I don't agree with forcing everyone to vote.

      One of the major problems with democracy is that the stupid people get just as much of a vote as the intelligent people. Allowing people to not vote at least lets a lot of the stupid people stay at home, and therefore increases the average intelligence of the voters.

      • Re:India stop laughing, it is not nice (Score:5, Insightful)

        by SoTuA ( 683507 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @02:05PM (#10844055)
        One of the major problems with democracy is that the stupid people get just as much of a vote as the intelligent people. Allowing people to not vote at least lets a lot of the stupid people stay at home, and therefore increases the average intelligence of the voters.

        Don't be so sure that the ones going to the booths are "more intelligent". Lots of them are the kind of voters that are easily brainwashed by propaganda/talk show hosts/party line blabber. You know, the ones that would have voted Democrat/Republican even if "Yog-Sothoth for prez, Cthulhu for VP" had been the democrat/republican ticket.

        • You know, the ones that would have voted Democrat/Republican even if "Yog-Sothoth for prez, Cthulhu for VP" had been the democrat/republican ticket.

          That sounds like a Democratic ticket to me. They always put the wrong candidate on the top of the ticket (ref: Dukakis/Bentsen, Mondale/Ferraro, Kerry/Edwards...).
    • The vote is done on a very simply laid out piece of paper. A mark is made with a pencil. Those who are blind or otherwise unable to fill it in on their selves can be helped by volunteer sworn in people from an another country, under no circumstance is anyone from america allowed to be in the same booth.
      The last election proving anything is the foreigners are as partison as Americans, it wouldn't really help remove bias to have people from other countries. Either way I think the disabled should be allowed t

      • Either way I think the disabled should be allowed to bring someone they trust into the booth with them (which currently is generally allowed, I don't know if it allowed offically though)...

        Hmmmm. Although I'm reasonably sure in practice this is all done in good faith, this seems like an easy way to corrupt the system. Who is to say that the person "they trust" is not someone who is threatening them and/or bribing them to influence their vote. Perhaps they have a way of dealing with this, but it seems t

        • I seriously doupt this would ever been done in block. I mean seriously how many people would you need to bribe all the handicapped voters, and take them to the polls. I doupt you could do this in a large enough scale to really effect any elections. But of course the disabled are people too, and also deserve the right to a secret ballot. Sadly this may not nessesarly be possible. I guess the best solution would be that any such bringing in of assistance would have to be pre-approved, otherwise assitance woul
          • My mother is blind and I've helped her vote before. It's really easy. You go to the polling place, she says "This is my son and he's going to help me vote." They then hand me the ballot, I hand my mom the ballot with a pointed look at the person who just handed it to me, and we go and vote.

            Nothing could be simpler. People just don't give you crap when you've got a handicapped person with ya. Though sometimes they'll talk to me and hand me things rather than interacting with her, but you can make it blatantl

      • Sadly the so called "trusted" helper has been known to abuse the trust. Sure using foreigners is extreme but at least use someone who has absolutly no relation and therefore no possible control over the person needing help.

        Voting should be done alone with YOUR vote only known to you. If it is impossible for this to happen then at least you should make sure that the person who knows YOUR vote doesn't know you or you will ever come to depend on.

        Certain countries were womens rights are not respected it is we

  • Other vote problems. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @12:21PM (#10842690) Journal
    Don't forget, that the votes being thrown out can still be claimed.
    But since people don't know their vote was thrown out there is no normal way of contacting them.

    So, Republicans called only Republicans and Democrats went to each of the Democrats and got signatures. And of course, which nobody knows if its legal. But thats why you vote by mail, because you can't make it in person. Vacation, Business travel, or any other reason.

    Also, I'm tired of all the problems with counting votes, bad enough we have machines that have *Glitches* and looses votes, or gives votes to the wrong person. It's not a fucking *Glitch* its a fucking failure! It's job is to count votes with 100% success. Thats like calling a lung machine that stops a *Glitch*...

    No paper trail, too short of time to count votes, machines that don't work, processes that don't work, human error and fraud.

    This is why everyone is pissed off, we know votes are being tampered with. Every time you do a recount, the vote count CHANGES!

    I live in Washington and voted by touch screen. I have no proof where my vote was cast, and I must trust the machine?! No wonder people also turn in paper ballots.

    In an age where powerful people are commiting fraud, why is it hard to believe that our votes are being corrupted?

    Oh look, Ohio had some fraud, couldnt happen in our state. Pffft.

  • Small correction (Score:3, Informative)

    by Pacifix ( 465793 ) <zorp@@@zorpy...com> on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @12:30PM (#10842797)
    The post says there's an incumbent in the race, but there isn't. The current governor, Gary Locke (D), chose not to run again, so both Gregoire (D) and Rossi (R) are challengers.

  • Blessing in Disguise? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BandwidthHog ( 257320 ) <inactive.slashdo ... icallyenough.com> on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @12:37PM (#10842889) Homepage Journal
    This could be a good thing. If enough "small" problems like this crop up, maybe that will help give some momentum to the idea that we need to audit the living hell out of the entire 2004 election. Not with an eye toward overturning Dubya's win or anything drastic like that, but with an eye toward finding and fixing any and all problems before the next run. I just don't see how that's anything other than common sense; we've done a fairly drastic overhaul of our electoral system over the past few years, so who could possibly say with a straight face that checking its accuracy after the fact is not absolutely essential?
  • our state name correctly! Washington State! It's not very often that the word "Washington" appears in news stories and actually refers to our state, so it would be nice if when it did it was at least capitalized correctly.

  • There is no incumbent (Score:3, Informative)

    by ironygranny ( 596328 ) <matthinz AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @12:43PM (#10842976)
    The race is between Chris Gregoire (D) and Dino Rossi (R), both vying to replace the outgoing Gary Locke.

  • Weird consistency (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dr. Spork ( 142693 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @01:03PM (#10843246)
    You know, something troubles me. Whenever weird "accidents" happen, like a block of votes being counted twice, the party that benefits is always the Republicans. There have been at many confirmed voting errors in Florida and Ohio alone, and all of them, when fixed, help Democrats and hurt Republicans.
    • How does it help the Republicans? Grays Harbor would have found the problem before certification was finalized; it was inevitable. It hurts the Republicans if anything, because it gave them a false sense of being ahead by 500 more than they should have been.

      And you must have missed the story yesterday [slashdot.org] where a Democrat was elected because of a glitch in Indiana.

      • Re:Weird consistency (Score:3, Informative)

        by rosie_bhjp ( 40538 )
        And you must have missed the story yesterday where a Democrat was elected because of a glitch in Indiana.
        Read it again.
        The 'glitch' referenced by yesterday's story gave straight Democratic Party votes to the Libertarian Party, thereby reducing the number of votes cast for the Democratic candidate and giving the victory to the Republican. The 'glitch' helped the Republicans (if it had not been caught).

    • Well, obviously, it's because the liberal media is only reporting the ones that benefit the Republicans! :)

      Seriously, I'm fairly certain that in the last two weeks there have been at least a couple reports of mistakes that helped the Democrats.

      Additionally, playing devil's advocate (and perhaps the word devil should be emphasized), one could argue that the mistakes that benefit Democrats are being hid better!

      (OK, there are all kinds of ways to play the conspiracy game, but that's what makes it so mu

  • A paper trail isn't all its cracked up to be (Score:4, Informative)

    by EduardoTheBastard ( 634008 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @01:41PM (#10843761) Journal
    Why does the poster assume there is no paper trail? From reading too many stories on Slashdot?

    I am a Washington State voter, and my whole county (Snohomish) uses the same type of voting machine. Other counties are different. But here you can watch the little ticker-tape coming out of the back of each machine. I don't know how the votes are encoded, but there is definitely a paper audit trail.

    I'm actually concerned about the accuracy of the recount, since it is likely to be hand-counted (required by law when the difference is below some threshold -- I don't know the specifics.) Despite any bugs in the electronic systems that may or may not affect the count, hand-counting pretty much guarantees a certain margin of error.

    Anyone ever tried to accurately count a stack of ten thousand pieces of paper, dividing them into two separate piles in the process? I screw up occassionally just separating puzzle pieces into separate groups of edge and center pieces -- for small (100 piece) jigsaw puzzles!

    • Why does the poster assume there is no paper trail? From reading too many stories on Slashdot?

      The post does not assume that. It assumes that SOME of the machines have no paper trail.

      I am a Washington State voter, and my whole county (Snohomish) uses the same type of voting machine. Other counties are different. But here you can watch the little ticker-tape coming out of the back of each machine. I don't know how the votes are encoded, but there is definitely a paper audit trail.

      Funny, I live in Snoho
    • Anyone ever tried to accurately count a stack of ten thousand pieces of paper, dividing them into two separate piles in the process? I screw up occassionally just separating puzzle pieces into separate groups of edge and center pieces -- for small (100 piece) jigsaw puzzles!

      I don't know how you count votes by hand, but in my country counting votes by hand involves at least three people (three "voting table staffers") and usually includes witnesses from each of the candidates involved.

    • Could you see your vote and verify it was the vote you cast on that little ticker tape?

      If you cannot see your vote being recorded on the tape, then the tape is no good really because it does not actually record what you did.

      The tape contains a record of what the machine decided to record. It may or may not be based on what you, the voter, actually did.

      The only acceptable systems are those that leave a voter verified paper trail. Without that, no trustworthy recount is possible...
  • The problem with paper trails is that you have to have people to handle the paper.

    Don't get me wrong, I WANT a paper trail, but I've been intimately involved enough in the mechanics of the voting system that I know a LOT of things have to change.

    Ever notice who your election judges are? Old retired people, unemployed people, high school drop-outs, etc. Why? Because we expect them to be at the polls at 5:30 am to set up and open at 6, then stay until 8pm after closing at 7 and doing all the things that n

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