"Something — something — happens every election.”
January 5, 2008 6:51 AM   Subscribe

“I’m an old computer nerd,” Diener said. “I can do anything with computers. Nothing’s wrong with computers. But this is the worst way to run an election.” NYTMag piece on electronic voting, voter confidence, and the impact of old-fashioned problems like printer jams, befuddled voters and volunteers, and interface design flaws. By Clive Thompson.
posted by Miko (46 comments total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
 
Just imagine how quickly - and thoroughly, and permanently - any equivalent problems with ATMs would be fixed.
posted by The Card Cheat at 7:16 AM on January 5, 2008 [7 favorites]


Having been ripped off in the last two US elections, it's obviously important to discuss how votes are taken and counted in this election. Thanks for your post Miko.

I've wondered about voting software and these badly functioning voting machines. Frankly, I only feel comfortable with a simple paper vote and do not remotely trust the electronic counting, at all.

Reading this the many wtf paragraphs from the article you linked is really disturbing, such as this one:

But in hundreds of instances, the result has been precisely the opposite: they fail unpredictably, and in extremely strange ways; voters report that their choices “flip” from one candidate to another before their eyes; machines crash or begin to count backward; votes simply vanish.


And then there is the Diebold company bs. Diebold manufactures voting machines.

The rumors began with this letter from Diebold's CEO, Wally Odell, who was moonlighting as a Republican fundraiser[2003]. In his invitation to a benefit for Bush last August, he wrote, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." Diebold Election Systems, the second largest company in the U.S. that counts votes … our votes

Came across this mind blowing video the other day and this thread seems like the best place to share it. This is an incredible video.

A computer programmer testifies that Tom Feeney (Speaker of the House of Florida at the time) tried to pay him to rig election vote counts.: Rigged USA Elections Exposed
posted by nickyskye at 7:19 AM on January 5, 2008


great read, it's so skeptical of the whole diebold process and electronic voting in general, but in such an un - conspiratorial way. usually when I read about Ohio voting fraud I've got some doubt about the arguments.. but this is interesting.

oh, and thanks Miko for catching holden and starting a very enlightening thread about non-profits.
posted by localhuman at 7:20 AM on January 5, 2008


what the card cheat said reminded me of something: those ATM machines and vending machines and the like always struck me as the frontier outposts of money and capitalism. maybe if we thought of our voting machines as the frontier outposts of Democracy, we'd take them much more seriously and harden them appropriately?
posted by paul_smatatoes at 7:38 AM on January 5, 2008 [1 favorite]




Just imagine how quickly - and thoroughly, and permanently - any equivalent problems with ATMs would be fixed.

This is mentioned in the article. The problem is that it's easy to spot errors with ATMs as you get a printout sent to you and can compare it to what happened. Because voting is anonymous there's no way to do that--in fact, the article states that some states specifically disallow any machine that leaves a paper trail as it could be used to determine the identity of voters.
posted by dobbs at 8:28 AM on January 5, 2008


I'm not as conspiratorial as others about Diebold etc., but our voting systems are frustratingly gameable.

I've come to see the problem as that old saw: Fast, cheap, accurate -- pick two. We want a system that's going to give us the victor the night of the election. We want it low-bid. And we want it to be 110% accurate.

Here in Washington we're switching to a vote-by-mail system; in fact, all the rural counties do this now, and Seattle is supposed to completely switch over this year. And that has its own problems. I remember in one recent election was mail-only, and while looking for a new place to rent I found a mailbox in front of one out with two ballots in it addressed to the previous occupant, just sticking out there. Obviously, it's theft to steal them, fraud to use them, but what will really stop me from doing that?

I don't believe there's a perfect system. No system prevents fraud. Diebold's system is by far the worst, since it means that fraud can be committed in an overarching way rather than having to actually deal with the rabble. But all the other systems have fraud and accuracy problems.

But I were to pick, I'd probably just go back to a piece of paper with boxes and a felt-tip pen. Make an X in the box, put the paper in the box, and then you count that. No electronics, no touch-screens. Just a bunch of volunteers and paper.

And speaking up, you know what annoys me? That people whine about elections, but no one wants to take a day of vacation to volunteer to run the polling places. If democracy is important to us, it should be considered a duty and a privilege to help keep the engines of democracy running. (And I'm including myself -- I vote, but I've never volunteered. I've considered doing that for the 2008 election....)
posted by dw at 8:41 AM on January 5, 2008 [2 favorites]


But I were to pick, I'd probably just go back to a piece of paper with boxes and a felt-tip pen. Make an X in the box, put the paper in the box, and then you count that. No electronics, no touch-screens. Just a bunch of volunteers and paper.

Works pretty well for us up here in Canada. I've argued with people from the States about the idea of switching to paper and pencils, and the arguments they trot out ("It'd be too slow!", "There are too many of us for that to work!", "It's not fraud-proof either!") have not been very convincing. I'm left to wonder why there's so much resistance against the idea south of the border, especially given how borked your current system obviously is?
posted by The Card Cheat at 8:57 AM on January 5, 2008


It'd be too slow!

I hear this from Americans often, too. It's laughable. They might as well just say, "The count doesn't have to be accurate; it just has to be fast." Give me convenience or give me death, indeed.
posted by dobbs at 9:05 AM on January 5, 2008


I'm not as conspiratorial as others about Diebold etc.

How can you not be? The people involved at the highest levels of that company are career criminals. A kid that was programming for them revealed that he'd been asked to provide backdoor access, and then was bumped-off for having leaked that info. The company owner himself promised to deliver the election to Bush.

Walks like a duck, talks like a duck, is feathered like a duck, and has been seen fucking other ducks... surely to god, Diebold is a duck.
posted by five fresh fish at 9:09 AM on January 5, 2008 [6 favorites]


I do not see why a paper ballot, manual counting system would be slower in the USA than in Canada. The proportion of polling stations, station workers, and poll counters is going to be about the same in either country: thus, the time taken is going to remain pretty much fixed.
posted by five fresh fish at 9:13 AM on January 5, 2008


" A kid that was programming for them revealed that he'd been asked to provide backdoor access, and then was bumped-off for having leaked that info."

Do you have any reliable citations for that, fff?
posted by tdismukes at 9:31 AM on January 5, 2008


There is a pretty major difference between US elections and Canadian elections that would make it much more time consuming to count paper ballots. In Canada, we only cast one vote: for the MP we want to represent us. In the US, one casts a whole lot of votes for a bunch of different positions at once. This would make paper ballots a lot more complicated and time consuming to count (you can't just sort them into piles, for one thing).

That said, given repeated problems that seem to crop up with American voting systems, waiting a little longer for the results to be announced seems like a pretty small price to pay.
posted by ssg at 9:37 AM on January 5, 2008


If democracy is important to us, it should be considered a duty and a privilege to help keep the engines of democracy running.

You could do it like jury duty-- notice in the mail.
posted by nax at 9:39 AM on January 5, 2008


Actually come to think of it, most Americans probably wouldn't care too much if they didn't find out about the winners of all the elected positions, aside from the presidency, right away. It wouldn't be too hard to count up the votes for the president the night of the election (we seem to manage the comparable count in Canada pretty easily) and then count up the votes for other positions in the days that follow.
posted by ssg at 9:43 AM on January 5, 2008


If democracy is important to us, it should be considered a duty and a privilege to help keep the engines of democracy running.

That's a pretty boring job, which is why Canada pay students, seniors, and other people who are unemployed to do the work (though the political parties send volunteer observers). Seems like the US could afford to pay for election workers, if dw is suggesting they don't or can't for some reason.
posted by ssg at 9:46 AM on January 5, 2008


Provably secure voting system exist that allow users to verify their vote (without being able to tell what they voted for) and provide the ability for external entities to prove (within some probabilistic bounds) that no one involved in tallying votes screwed with the numbers. These system are designed with the idea in mind that people and machines are fallible. While the systems can't produce a correct result when someone tries to rig the vote, they can detect that someone did. punchscan and civitas are two such systems.

The problem is that you need a BS in math to understand that they are secure, or you need to know who to trust to tell you it is secure. I think a lot of people heard people say the existing electronic voting systems are secure (they use passwords, right?) and then they saw one of the many demonstrations that they are very hackable. It will be hard to convince people that these new system actually are secure.
posted by recursion at 10:10 AM on January 5, 2008


"Fast, cheap, accurate -- pick two." " It'd be too slow!" "waiting a little longer for the results to be announced seems like a pretty small price to pay."

I was rather proud that the weeks after the 2000 elections proved unequivocally that speed in results is a non-issue.
posted by klarck at 10:38 AM on January 5, 2008


This seems pretty darn simple to me. If your political party or administration is willing to fire US attorneys in bulk for refusing to press voter fraud charges, but at the same time you don't seem to care about trustworthy vote counting machines, you've lost any legitimate claim to the higher ideal of election honesty.

I don't know what a true fix would look like, but it would probably have characteristics like open source for software and hardware, a paper trail, slowness, and non-trivial expense.

I think a bit of slowness would be good for the country. There's no reason we need to know the outcome of an election at 7:05pm after the polls close, or even the same week as far as I'm concerned.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 10:46 AM on January 5, 2008


I really liked, of course, Bruce Schneier's suggestion of machine-assisted voting, rather than machine-handled voting.

In his view, we should have one set of machines to assist with the creation of a normal paper ballot, one that's entirely human-readable. These machines would be optional; if you don't want help, you can fill out a ballot by hand. Most people will probably for the assistance; the machine can be as sophisticated as needed. But the final output is a simple, old-fashioned paper ballot, albeit once that's very nicely printed. The human gets his or her ballot and must physically take it elsewhere to be deposited, preferably after having inspected it. He or she could easily be given a second copy as a record of the vote.

The actual counting machines, on the other hand, should be extremely simple and brainless, just robots to count marks and that's all. Let the humans correlate/tabulate/report from there.

We've been voting on paper for more than two hundred years, and there's no rush whatsoever to change that system. It's hard to hijack paper, and it leaves traces... computer crime is invisible.
posted by Malor at 10:58 AM on January 5, 2008


I vote, but I've never volunteered. I've considered doing that for the 2008 election....)

You know, that's a good thought, dw. One of the factors mentioned in the article was that many election volunteers are on the elderly side and many of them are not as techologically adept simply because of lack of lifelong familiarity with it. I know at the polling places I've voted all my life, the volunteers have generally been almost without exception people in their 70s and 80s, which always struck me as strange. Maybe if there were more diversity of skill in the volunteer corps, it would help a bit.

But as far as paper ballots, where I vote in Southern Maine, we still use them. It's fast enough. We mark the ballot and then a volunteer scans it through an optical reader, exactly like the type used for standardized tests. The ballot is then dropped into a slot. So we have the two records: the fast one from the scanner count, used to report returns. If it's close, or if a recount is demanded, volunteers then end up going through the paper ballots, so there is a double-check.

It's such a good system that I've been puzzled by the imagined superiority of the touch-screen system. Perhaps it's faster to get people through the lines at polling places, but couldn't that be solved by opening more polling places or adding more booths? By repurposing the money states are spending on electronic machines, surely that would be possible?
posted by Miko at 11:23 AM on January 5, 2008


In the US, one casts a whole lot of votes for a bunch of different positions at once. This would make paper ballots a lot more complicated and time consuming to count.

I forgot about that. It always baffles me that the local dog-catcher position is an elected position. I simply don't see how that improves the quality of democracy; and besides which, figuring out who to hire for that role is why I elect a mayor: it's his job, not mine.

tdismukes: Try this and this.

Looks like I was mistaking the investigator's death for the programmer's death, though.
posted by five fresh fish at 12:05 PM on January 5, 2008


I've argued with people from the States about the idea of switching to paper and pencils, and the arguments they trot out ("It'd be too slow!", "There are too many of us for that to work!", "It's not fraud-proof either!")

Paper and writing implement is (last I checked, which was a year + ago) the most common voting method in the US. What we don't do is hand counting, mostly because we have lots of offices and ballot questions on the same ballot. Local and provincial elections in Canada sometimes have an abundance of offices, and local and provincial elections in Canada are also sometimes counted electronically. In addition to simple time issues, having lots of issues/races on the same ballot introduces cross-counting errors, and I would bet that optical scanners do a more accurate job than bored humans who've been doing the same thing for four hours already.

That said, there are real reasons to like electronic voting, or at least the electronic filling in of ballots.

One, you don't have to worry about language issues. All of your ballots are in English, and in Spanish, and in Vietnamese, and in Chinese, and in Korean, and in Tagalog, and in French, whatever.

Two, it deals nicely with overvotes. "You just tried to vote for two candidates for President. You can't do that. Go back and choose only one, or push here to skip that election and move on."

Three, it can alert no-votes or undervotes. "You didn't vote for U.S. Representative. If that was you intent, press here. If you intended to vote for a candidate for that office, press here." Or "You voted for one candidate for city council. You can vote for up to three candidates for that office. Press here to record only one vote, or press here to go back and revise your selections."

None of this means the current electronic voting systems aren't stupid. It's a solved problem, as Schneier points out -- use whatever gizmo you like to print a human-readable ballot that gets stored and optically scanned.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 1:22 PM on January 5, 2008


fff: It's not that strange. If you have a system of checks and balances, and each of the branches is ultimately accountable to the people, then there are several elections at every level. Since we have a rather strongly decentralized power model, they stay important. I have never seen dog catcher on the list of things that I have to vote for, but I can see something like this:

Federal
President
Senate
House
State
Governor
Senate
House
State Supreme Court
State District/Appeals Court Judge
County
County Board Member
County General Executive
Sheriff
Locality
General Executive
City Legislator
Local Judge
Police Chief?
School Board


That's a lot, but I hypothetically want to be able to make sure that each level of government is not screwing up. Theoretically, as one gets more distant from accountability there's an easier time of screwing up and not having anything done about it. The unfortunate reality is that we're too lazy to check in on any meaningful part of this. Most people can't name past #1 or #2 on the list; they might know the mayor but probably don't look into her opponents in a real way. A kind of idealistic bunch came up with the system, and perhaps in the restricted-franchise model which dominated until the 20th century the voters (being more wealthy, more connected to government, and maybe more idle) may have actually checked in on each layer.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 1:43 PM on January 5, 2008


It always baffles me that the local dog-catcher position is an elected position. I simply don't see how that improves the quality of democracy

One word: Graft.
posted by dhartung at 2:23 PM on January 5, 2008


"Try this and this.

Looks like I was mistaking the investigator's death for the programmer's death, though."


fff- From what I've been able to find out, there seem to be some substantial problems with Clint Curtis's credibility on this issue. See here for more details.

In particular,

1) Curtis did not work for Diebold, but rather for Yang Enterprises. I have not been able to find any information stating that Yang is involved with electronic voting. Supposedly, it was not his employer but a Florida state representative who asked him for the code to rig electronic voting machines.
2) At the time (2000), Florida was not yet even using electronic voting machines.
3) Curtis had no access to the code for any actual voting machines, so his program could not have been useful for anything more than a theoretical exercise. You can't write a program to hack a system that you don't know anything about.
4) Curtis didn't even come public with his claims about vote-rigging until 4 years after the fact.

As far as the death of Raymond Lemme:

1) Lemme was investigating a host of corruption allegations, not just Curtis's story about election-rigging.
2) The police investigation found that Lemme's death was a suicide.

For all I know, Lemme may have been murdered to cover up something, though probably not Curtis's supposed vote-rigging program. However, to state definitely that he was murdered and for a particular purpose puts you in the same realm as the conspiracy theorists who are certain that Bill & Hillary Clinton really murdered a bunch of people.

Mind you, I'm a strong advocate for improving the security of voting systems. I don't believe that Clint Curtis knows anything about any actual vote-rigging conspiracies, but if we leave glaring holes in security the way we have been, it's inevitable that sooner or later someone will figure out how to commit wholesale vote fraud while leaving no evidence behind.
posted by tdismukes at 3:56 PM on January 5, 2008


I used to have a big problem with electronic voting machines. Last election I got all hot and bothered about their threat to democracy, but after Bush won I realized that the real threat to democracy isn't coming from people gaming the system with rigged votes or Gerrymandering.

Honestly, rigged votes are the least of this country's problems. Because last election shouldn't have been anywhere near close enough to be possible to game. The decision last election was so mind-numbingly simple that it shouldn't have been close enough to matter if even 25% of the votes were stolen.

The problem with this country has little to do with voting machines and a lot more to do with your "fellow Americans." They're dumb as dogshit, and there are millions of 'em. That's the problem. 2000 and 2004 should have both been landslide Democratic wins. But they weren't. Dems looking at rigged voting machines as the cause celeb are misguided and, I'm sorry to say, reak of "sore loser" to the people inhabiting the soft, cushy middle of this country. If this country were filled with reasonable people, the Republicans could steal millions of votes and still have their asses handed to 'em in an election. The fact that it was close enough to steal speaks volumes of our fundamental misunderstanding of just how terminally stupid the majority of Americans really are.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 4:16 PM on January 5, 2008 [1 favorite]


Civil_Disobedient writes "The problem with this country has little to do with voting machines and a lot more to do with your 'fellow Americans.' They're dumb as dogshit, and there are millions of "em."

That's true. A voting system fraught with problems is not going to help, however. Education is important. It's not the only thing that's important.
posted by krinklyfig at 7:44 PM on January 5, 2008


tdismukes: k, thanks for schooling me.

Still not sure how you figure Diebold and ES&S aren't ducks.
posted by five fresh fish at 10:01 PM on January 5, 2008


Or perhaps you do. D-oh. Apologies for that remark.
posted by five fresh fish at 10:01 PM on January 5, 2008


In other words this is the best way to run an "election"
posted by Smedleyman at 10:47 PM on January 5, 2008


How to steal an election.

Maybe a bit dated now. Maybe not. I've not read it in a while.
posted by sparkletone at 3:23 AM on January 6, 2008


2000 and 2004 should have both been landslide Democratic wins. But they weren't.

C_D the conspiracy_theorists among us actually take your statement as *evidence* that the votes were cooked (esp. 2004). We optimistically believe that Americans are *not* dumb as dirt, therefore something else must be going on.
posted by nax at 7:32 AM on January 6, 2008


In Greg Palast's "Armed Madhouse," he makes a very very good case that the last two elections were stolen through voter suppression.

He notes that, from the government's own records, your ballot has four times the chance of not being counted if you're from a primarily African-American precinct and *thirty* times the chance of not being counted if you're a Native American -- and that ignores the fact that wait times are typically far longer for you too (if you remember, four hour and longer delays in Ohio last time!)

According to the government's own records, over two MILLION ballots were not counted last election, disproportionately in areas that would generally vote Democrat.

He feels that the voting machines are a smokescreen -- not that they're not picking up votes there too but the actual work is done through voter suppression. Beware!!

(Note that Bush allowed them to bring forward these ideas of "provisional ballots" -- but then made sure that there's no money for them to be *counted*....)
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 8:13 AM on January 6, 2008


Another disturbing facet of the US election system is that people who have been incarcerated can't vote, IIRC. Once you break the law, you lose your rights as a citizen of the country.

Given the astounding incarceration rate in the USA, and the absurdity of some of the laws, this should be a Big Deal.

In many ways, the system is currently set up to exclude the poor from participation.
posted by five fresh fish at 9:09 AM on January 6, 2008


fff, I think that only applies to felons. I agree that it's a big deal in some ways, because our incarceration system definitely is not fairly applied. But if it were fair, revoking the right to vote seems an appropriate consequence of disregarding the nation's laws.

I also think that paroled felons can petition to receive the right to vote back. But IANAL and have almost gone blind from too much time on the net the last few days, so I don't want to look it up right now.
posted by Miko at 10:03 AM on January 6, 2008


I'm not sure what the difference between breaking the law enough to go to jail, and being a felon is.

But either way, the general gist of imprisonment, at least in most first-world countries, is that if one does the crime, then does the time, one is considered to have paid one's dues to society and is allowed back into normal society.

Except in the USA, where you're going to be haunted for the rest of your life.
posted by five fresh fish at 10:18 AM on January 6, 2008


Wikipedia on Felony

Hm, yeah, turns out this dates from Reconstruction which would encourage me to think its roots are in racism. I'm not gonna stick up too hard for this system, just saying that there's not a huge outcry about it, at least not yet.
posted by Miko at 10:22 AM on January 6, 2008


We optimistically believe that Americans are *not* dumb as dirt, therefore something else must be going on.

I used to believe that, too. While I lived on the Eastern seaboard, I kept asking myself, "Just where are all these fools that keep voting against their own self-interest?" Then I moved to Nebraska for a time, and it all became clear: the United States is like an M&M... the hard, intelligent candy shell has no concept of how large the messy chocolate center is. Once you get a hundred miles inland and cross the stupidity barrier, you'll find it's nothing but idiots for a thousand+ miles.

I once went to a rodeo in some middle-of-nowhere town in Nebraska. They had a rodeo clown dressed in black-face, cracking jokes about Hillary Clinton. Keep in mind, this was 5 years ago, long before Hillary announced her candidacy for president. No, this was residual anger from... shit, ten years prior, that they just kept holding on to. Like, "How dare a woman be so uppity!" That's the kind of crazy you're dealing with. You don't realize it because you probably live in a Sensibility Bubble like I did. But the country is teeming with these fucks, like a cancer that has metastasized but not yet erupted through the skin.

The body, however, has been completely eaten-away. Now it's just a loose skin of smarts holding in a bag of goo.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 10:24 AM on January 6, 2008 [2 favorites]


Well, I'm in the messy chocolate center (okay, not Nebraska, but Illinois), and people seem pretty smart around here.
posted by nax at 11:19 AM on January 6, 2008


nax, and I say this as a native missourian, Illinois is an aberration of the midwest. The southern half is as racist as Indiana, but the northern part (an chicago, even more so) is old-school progressivism, like Minnesota tries to be, and Wisconsin (esp. Madison) aspires to.
posted by notsnot at 1:21 PM on January 6, 2008


Illinois is an aberration of the midwest.

Definitely a Sensibility Bubble. There's a few scattered across the country; usually you can find them along major waterways and to a lesser extent rail lines, where commerce (and thus culture) has a historical foothold. It's probably not a coincidence that the areas most affected by immigrant migration are also the most progressive. Monocultures have a predilection for isolationism.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 3:25 PM on January 6, 2008


The candy shell comparison was funny, but definitely too simplistic. Here on the East Coast an hour or so from Boston, I'm surrounded by progressive, educated, thoughtful people. But I can drive 10 minutes in either non-ocean direction and find people who don't agree with me and share some of the lifestyles and values of 'the chocolate center.' Those maps that came out after 2004 showing that the divide was more a city vs. suburban/rural split between red and blue seemed pretty accurate to me. All up and down the East Coast, you can find pockets of people who are more or less sheltered from diversity of opinion not very far from pockets of liberalism.
posted by Miko at 6:39 PM on January 6, 2008


I cannot help thinking about those unreliable, hackable, opaque Diebold voting machines every time I use my bank's ATM.

The last time an ATM mis-counted even one note of my money was, I don't know, maybe 15 years ago? The deposit envelope system always works perfectly too. So does the receipt printer. The menus are clear and easy to navigate. And even if I had an excavator and a spare hour, I probably wouldn't be able to dig the thing out of the wall of the bank.

OK, it's out of order occasionally. But apart from that, the thing's (probably literally) bulletproof.

The reason why I always think of those American voting machines, though, is because of the prominent badge on the front of that ATM.

The badge says, of course, "DIEBOLD".

Diebold could make a perfect voting machine if they wanted to. But they don't.

Until someone does, I'm glad to live in Australia, where our hand-written ballots are hand-counted, too. It never seems to take very long.

We'd be happy to send a couple of blokes over to show you how to do it, if you like.
posted by dansdata at 8:40 PM on January 6, 2008 [1 favorite]


Interview with Clive Thompson.
posted by homunculus at 12:57 PM on January 10, 2008


notsnot and C_D point taken, but those of us in flyover country are extremely sensitive about being painted with such a broad brush. Maybe instead of crude remarks about what idiots we are here in the middle, you could get involved in voter education? You could try living among the great unwashed so that you start to understand the bizarre "what's the matter with Kansas" phenomenon? I agree that people behave in incomprehensible ways, and vote against their own self-interest, but I think calling us "dumber than dogshit" just gives a free pass to the criminals who keep stealing elections through the 21st century versions of poll taxes , the shameful disengagement of the Supreme Court in Gore vs Bush, and the free reign given to Diebold.
posted by nax at 5:57 PM on January 10, 2008 [1 favorite]


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