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Touchscreen voting: Threat, or Menace?
10-27-2008, 10:29 PM
I've now seen over a dozen reports, from both sides, of people claiming that touchscreen machines mis-registered their votes. A lot of them track back to
one manufacturer; it looks like simple poor maintenance is at fault, rather than political bias.
Anyone else running into this with ES&S machines?
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Somehow Canada manages to do entire elections with "here is a slip of paper and a pencil" technology.
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Epsilon
I look at it this way. As long as it doesn't ask me " Do you want to play a game?"
or tells me I jsut spent my entire life savings on a Spoo farm I'll be okay. 
It's a terrible idea in general. There is absolutely no incentive for Diebold to make the machines work right or be secure, because they can make even more
money fixing, redesigning, and reselling them. Not to mention how easily they can be used for massive voter fraud, and how difficult it is to track that due to
the lack of a paper trail.
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And if you don't speak up right then and there, right at the booth, you get accused of sour-grapesing and only bringing it up 'cause your guy lost and you want to do something about it.
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CattyNebulart
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And Yuku is very well fed on my posts.
The short of it is that voting machines seem to be designed to enable fraud, and the government seems to be aiding and abetting. If shehanigans like this where
done with slot machines in Las Vegas heads would roll.
And even if fraud is not the goal, some machines are so bad they don't even report totals consistent with their tally of the other votes.
this is mindbogglingly bad.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
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On an odd note, I voted today using voting machines at the local courthouse. The machines used solid buttons made of plastic, clearly labeled for what they did, and there were at least three redundancies in the programming itself where it asked you if you were sure that this was what you wanted to vote for.
And then, it printed out paper results of what you voted behind a glass screen for you to go over again, to make sure you voted for these people, making a hardcopy record. At which point, you had to press the "Cast Vote" button again in order to lock in the votes you made. Someone beside me apparently messed up and had to cancel her votes, and I got to listen to the nice guy helping out explain to her how she could just scroll back to what she wanted to change, change it, and then go back to the confirmation screen again.
Personally, I think this is much more reliable than a touch screen of all things. I may be a technophile that doesn't see people's phobias of voting machines, but a touch screen is notoriously unreliable for something as simple as inputting your groceries at Wal-Mart. I wouldn't trust it with actual voting.
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Eh, its not so much technophobia as it is a simple case of "It ain't broke"-ism.
Seriously, there is no need for your country to go beyond the "paper slips and pencils" level of voting. While we Canadians don't have the same
overall population as you the population density in our largest cities is easily comprable to your own and yet we manage to have orderly fraud-free elections
for the most part.
Perhaps introducing machine assisted voting will make sense two or three generations from now when everyone in the world is computer-literate to the same level
you are. However it makes no sense to introduce confusing machine assisted voting (and no matter how clear you find it I gaurentee there is somebody out there
who finds it byzantinely obfuscating) while we still have several generations particpating who can not reliable operate their answering machines, much less a
computer voting terminal.
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Epsilon
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Well, there actually were pencil and paper options there as well. In fact, using the machines was entirely optional, and there was about an even number of people at either option. I'm not so much suggesting that "pencil and paper: inferior, voting machines: superior" as I am noting that voting machines aren't inherently a source for fraud, which is just as viable in a system that uses all paper ballots as on the most advanced computer voting machine. It's a double-standard that I find somewhat annoying, because the general opinion seems to be "no one would stoop to ballot box stuffing....unless it's on the computer".
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OpMegs Wrote:On an odd note, I voted today using voting machines at the local courthouse. The machines used solid buttons made of plastic, clearly labeled for what they did, and there were at least three redundancies in the programming itself where it asked you if you were sure that this was what you wanted to vote for.
And then, it printed out paper results of what you voted behind a glass screen for you to go over again, to make sure you voted for these people, making a hardcopy record. At which point, you had to press the "Cast Vote" button again in order to lock in the votes you made. Someone beside me apparently messed up and had to cancel her votes, and I got to listen to the nice guy helping out explain to her how she could just scroll back to what she wanted to change, change it, and then go back to the confirmation screen again.
Personally, I think this is much more reliable than a touch screen of all things. I may be a technophile that doesn't see people's phobias of voting machines, but a touch screen is notoriously unreliable for something as simple as inputting your groceries at Wal-Mart. I wouldn't trust it with actual voting.
I seem to remember hearing about machines with this sort of design around the time of some previous election.
They sound awesome and I wish they had them here. It'd make voting much more pleasant than the hunching over in a booth. (They usually don't have one with a work surface high enough to be comfortable for me.)
Though, I don't see any reason why such an architecture couldn't be used with a touch screen. But then, my experiences in retail suggest that touch screens are generally far more reliable than the people operating them...
-Morgan.
I just voted on a touch screen. It was easy as pie to do. In and
out in about a minute. No troubles at all.
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I recall reading in another forum here that some of the old voting machines had an issue where if the inner counter strips a gear, the voting count stops at
99, and all votes after that are wasted.
This just goes back to "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," and the wisdom of pencil 'n paper.
Edit: Just had an odd thought. Do you think Malcolm McDowell in Fallout 3 as "President John Henry Eden" is meant as a backhanded reference to the
unreliability of the electronic voting machine? His rant about how he got elected is a really nice touch.
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