Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2012/11/06/reddit-user-captures-video-of-2012-voting-machines-altering-votes/

by jipumarino • 14 years ago

1072 637 14 years ago

thenextweb.com

jackalope• 14 years ago

Obviously staged, obviously edited, obviously fake.

binaryorganic2• 14 years ago

I'll give you obviously edited, but why so sure about the other two?

bradmccarty• 14 years ago

I can't even give obviously edited. Ever used a lower-end Android phone? I have, and this looks like a video directly from one. Jittery, frame skipping mess.

Edit: Also, it's been verified and taken offline. http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/11/06/machine-turns-vote-for-obama-...

clebio• 14 years ago

Evidence, citations? Not at all obvious. On the surface, looks quite real. And I've had enough touch-screen devices to know that mis-calibration is common, so it's plausible.

socialist_coder• 14 years ago

I agree. It looks absolutely fake to me. But according to other sources it was confirmed =\

kin• 14 years ago

MSNBC confirmed the machine was defective in the article.

briandear9• 14 years ago

And MSNBC is credible?

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2012-11-02/entertainment/ba...

salman892• 14 years ago

Voting machines need to be a lot better than this or not exist at all, but does anyone actually think that IF this machine was altering votes, it would alter it in this fashion with a UI element tied to the alteration? Seems more like a crappy touch screen.

jneal• 14 years ago

This was my thought exactly. If someone was going through the trouble of altering votes, it would make no sense to make note of this within UI elements, it could just as easily "secretly" change the votes for 1/8 (just my theoretical magical number) voters and alter the results just enough without being noticeable.

Nursie• 14 years ago

I wonder though... maybe the inconvenience would be enough to either change a percentage of votes or make a few people give up.

Looks like a bug, actually swings a close election?

weaksauce4• 14 years ago

from the article (emphasis mine): > I initially selected Obama but Romney was highlighted. I assumed it was being picky so I deselected Romney and tried Obama again, this time more carefully, and still got Romney. Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney’s name and started tapping very closely together to find the ‘active areas’. From the top of Romney’s button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama’s name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein’s button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.

swang• 14 years ago

Except this just frustrates the voter and maybe he doesn't bother voting for Obama at all. There's no accusation of "altering" the votes because how do you track, "Touchscreen didn't select Obama, voter just gave up?"

polarix• 14 years ago

Yep. That's clearly what's happening, and given that there's instant feedback, the user would know there's a problem, and either ask for a different machine or adjust until the system represents their actual intent.

Groxx• 14 years ago

I'm not claiming it is malicious, but would they? If they can swing even 1% of the votes of people who just don't care enough, or would feel embarrassed at failing to use a machine, they can have a significant impact while having an obvious scapegoat.

Assuming it's miscalibration, how many people used this machine before the video? how many afterward?

>I then called over a volunteer to have a look at it. She him hawed for a bit then calmly said “It’s nothing to worry about, everything will be OK.” and went back to what she was doing. I then recorded this video.

That sounds like they were very likely the first person to complain. What did the rest do?

danielweber28• 14 years ago

It sure looks exactly that way from the video.

I've used that exact type of machine to vote in North Carolina (but this ballot is not from North Carolina). You have all sorts of people pounding on the screen all day.

Remember the reason we all wanted electronic voting after the year 2000: because it gives absolutely clear answers, not necessarily better answers. (Even the best systems have errors because there are humans involved.) You don't have to debate whether that smudge counts or does not count as a vote.

weaksauce4• 14 years ago

Electronic voting should be allowed but not unless it prints out a ballot with all your selections on it so you can verify and have a real paper trail; not some bit in a database that can be changed and most likely has been changed in the past based on grand jury testimony from one of the diebold programmers. As a programmer knowing how insecure programs are I want paper for something like this.

trhtrsh12• 14 years ago

"We all" never wanted electronic voting. "We" wanted electronically-counted paper voting.

baddox• 14 years ago

> does anyone actually think that IF this machine was altering votes, it would alter it in this fashion with a UI element tied to the alteration

I think you mean if the machine was intentionally designed to alter votes, it wouldn't do it in this fashion. The article doesn't even hint that this might be done on purpose.

citricsquid3• 14 years ago

> The article doesn't even hint that this might be done on purpose.

Altering is an action, not something passive. If a machine is altering votes then it must be doing that intentionally. What is happening here is the person interacting with this machine is interacting in such a way that makes the machine believe he is pressing elsewhere on the screen.

The title reads as if the machine is doing something, the reality is the user is doing something in such a way that the machine believes they're doing something else, due to poor calibration.

rmc6• 14 years ago

The article doesn't even hint that this might be done on purpose.

Cause it won't be spun like that at all.

tocomment• 14 years ago

But maybe the programmer didn't do this. Maybe it's something under the election worker's control like calibration settings on only part of the screen, or the spacing of the ballot, or something else user-configurable. Just a thought?

salman892• 14 years ago

Highly doubtful that an election machine would be able to pass any standard tests that would allow it to be specifically rigged like that by an election worker. If it were built to calibrate on only part of a screen, it would be ripe for rigging by both sides.

morsch6• 14 years ago

The shenanigans you seem to tolerate during elections are just incomprehensible to us foreigners. The number of horror stories I've heard in the last couple of weeks regarding everything from just weirdness of the system to blatant manipulation is farcical.

It's possible that I'm getting a bleaker picture than reality, I suppose, since I only read about the broken stuff and not the instances where everything just works.

veridies• 14 years ago

For the most part, things aren't as bad as they seem. It's a huge country and any oddities gain a great deal of traction. Most votes go simply and smoothly.

That being said, I'm taking a two hour drive later today to vote because my vote-by-mail ballot never arrived, so...

MartinCron11• 14 years ago

It's possible that I'm getting a bleaker picture than reality, I suppose, since I only read about the broken stuff and not the instances where everything just works.

You only hear about the ballots that crash, not the millions that land safely every election.

pnathan4• 14 years ago

(1) We have > 300 M people. That's a huge population.

(2) We are OK publicizing it.

(3) Probability would indicate that we'll have a certain error, and it'll be shouted about.

---

But it's very strange that it was "miscalibrated" to not select one particular candidate, no? :)

3JPLW• 14 years ago

Selection bias, perhaps. Sure, there will be a small amount of miscalibrated machines. And a smaller amount will happen to be miscalibrated to select the wrong candidate. But you'll only ever hear about those latter cases. The others will be caught and corrected without internet vitriol.

mindstab• 14 years ago

> We have > 300 M people. That's a huge population

Um, unless you're talking to India which manages to pull off votes with 1.2 Billion People. You are like 25% their population.

citricsquid3• 14 years ago

> But it's very strange that it was "miscalibrated" to not select one particular candidate, no? :)

The internet loves Obama. There are many stories of people that support Obama cheating the system (right now there's a popular story of someone admitting on Facebook to voting for Obama 4 times...) and that isn't on the front page of HN, when that is absolutely confirmed to be a misuse of the system.

Everything that is a disadvantage for Obama is naturally going to get more attention, because most of the internet age that use sites like reddit and HN are the sort that want progress.

I'll bet there are machines that have this problem (assuming this is not an isolated incident and his a software/hardware issue) that vote for Obama when Romney is clicked, but that won't be big news in this circle of news because who cares about Romney here?

Edit: here you go, same problem that affects Romney votes on another machine http://www.cbs42.com/content/localnews/story/Voting-machines...

tlrobinson• 14 years ago

Note the video didn't show him trying to select other candidates.

skrause2• 14 years ago

I never understand the population argument. Counting votes is perfectly scalable, if one in a thousand people volunteers to count votes it doesn't matter if your population is 1000 or one billion.

In Germany voting machines have been banned completely with good reasons, because they're unsafe and easy to to hack. And still we can pull off a purely paper-based votes with 82 million people completely without any lines in front of the voting booths and results within two hours after the election.

grecy7• 14 years ago

> (1) We have > 300 M people. That's a huge population.

It's hilarious when Americans use that as an excuse for things being sub-par in their country. I see it all the time for health care, roads, schools etc.

Yes, your country has lots of people in it, but it also takes in an enormous amount of tax, and has enormous government agencies to organize this kind of thing. Everything should scale up appropriately, but you guys have no figured that out yet.

matthewowen• 14 years ago

300m people is a complete red herring. That also means you have many more people available to process ballots / provide infrastructure.

jarek7• 14 years ago

I had a similar reaction. The regulations on what is required to vote differ between states?! Cities run polling stations?!

David Frum weighing in: http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/05/opinion/frum-election-chaos/in...

moultano• 14 years ago

The US is schizophrenic about whether it wants to be one country or not.

sp3322• 14 years ago

Did you miss the States part of "United States of America"? Ever since Madison's brilliant compromise at the founding of our current government http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_Compromise the USA has tried to be mindful of the sovereignty of the states. (America's previous government, under the Articles of Confederation, was a loose agreement among the states http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State%27s_rights#Controversy_to...) The balance got out of hand in the mid-1800's and a civil war broke out over the issues of states' rights vs. the federal government. Generally, states have the freedom to run elections in any way they want without interference from the federal government.

In fact there was a case in my home state of New Hampshire a few years ago, where a state worker was investigated for not using funds that had been made available by the federal government for each state to use for elections. The state worker's defense was that the money had strings attached; basically there were some restrictions on how the federal money could be used during the election. The investigation was dropped immediately, in favor of the worker. Basically my state would rather spend millions of extra dollars to run the elections than allow the federal government to put restrictions on the way they run elections.

amalcon• 14 years ago

That's a side effect of the way we've suborned the electoral college. When an individual in the U.S. "votes for a Presidential candidate", they are actually voting in a state-wide election (to determine who the state's electors vote for). The election isn't national, so there's usually no need for the Federal government to be involved.

That's also one reason we're so hesitant to get rid of the thing: at the same time, we'd need to nationalize election administration. If we didn't, it would be much easier for states to "cheat" and exaggerate their voting power by claiming higher voter turnout than what actually happened.

Think of it like a badly-designed old dataflow that you would love fix, but there are so many dependencies now that it's become a major project.

ars4• 14 years ago

Actually it's quite the opposite: People get so worked up about these things because they don't tolerate it.

If you never hear about these things in your own country that means that apparently no one there cares.

jarek7• 14 years ago

> If you never hear about these things in your own country that means that apparently no one there cares.

Or that they don't happen...

yesbabyyes2• 14 years ago

If OP comes from a democracy, I highly doubt they do things like:

- Voter ID to discourage minorities, students, elderly [1]

- "True the Vote", invoking a problem that doesn't exist [2]

- Another article on "True the Vote" [3]

- Blocking voting on the weekend before election [4]

- You don't see lines like this in other developed countries. It's not that they're not reported on because "no one cares", they're not reported on because there aren't any lines. [5]

- Again, you don't see stuff like this on election day outside of the US: [6]

- Thankfully, there are honorable republicans who also call this out, like Conor Friedersdorf: [7]

- And this, it's just... Baffling to people in the rest of the world. [8]

Again, this is unheard of where I live, not because people don't care but because we're not (completely) bamboozled!

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuOT1bRYdK8

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-ball...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/us/politics/groups-like-tr...

[4] http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/sep/21/voting-wron...

[5] http://news.yahoo.com/voting-already-mess-florida-041641182....

[6] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/no-one-i...

[7] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/shame-on...

[8] http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/doral-florida-early-vo...

robotresearcher• 14 years ago

There's also the possibility that other countries have more robust voting systems so there is less to complain about. Do you think voters wait in line for five hours in Germany, or get turned away from booths in Scotland? Voter turn out is slightly larger in both countries compared to the US, so apathy probably won't explain fewer complaints. It's more likely that the lack of a US national standard system permits more screw-ups and maybe occasional outright abuse.

*(Scotland 64%, Germany 68%, US 55%)

rickmb• 14 years ago

If they didn't tolerate it, they wouldn't have voting machines in the first place.

In many other countries these things are banned because people care.

eumenides1• 14 years ago

I don't understand why isn't there a national council responsible for maintaining consistent and well run elections.

To me it would seem like an easy win to push for it and push it through. "We need to preserve our democracy!" "Any one who doesn't vote for this bill, is unamerican!" "We cannot let our ability to vote be assaulted!" etc.

MartinCron11• 14 years ago

Our government is structured in such a way that elections are run at the local level, which can be seen as a strength. Imagine how dangerous it could be if one company manufactured every single voting machine used in every single polling place.

toufka• 14 years ago

There's an interesting line of thought that a fragmented and diverse set of technologies and policies is more robust than a consolidated 'council'. You might be able to mess up any given district - but if you corrupt the council then you straight up win.

This makes a bit less sense when you look at how it ends up that a very few districts end up deciding the race - but I think the idea itself is sound. Those battlegrounds will shift, likely more rapidly than endemic corruption can take hold.

jcurbo2• 14 years ago

In the US, the power to manage elections is still very much held at the state level. There have been federal inroads (Voting Rights Act) but historically the states have held full control over voting procedures. Most positions being voted on are state-level or lower (the only federal ones are President/VP, Senate, House) and all initiatives being voted on are state-level or lower. Also, the Constitution specifically gives power over choosing of Electors to the states. (Article II Section 1 "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors") so each state does things differently.

simonsarris• 14 years ago

Well to inject a bit of optimism here let me tell how of how it "just works" in the second largest city in New Hampshire.

There are several "wards" in the city, and each contains a school that is the voting location. Outside of each location will be people holding signs of all candidates, but all they said this morning are things like "Happy voting" and "Thank you for voting."

Inside the location there will be about 8 lines with last name letters. A-D and E-H, I-M, etc. If your last name was Dorette you would get into the A-D line. This is one bottleneck, but it resolves very quickly. You say your name, they find your name and cross it off, and you are handed a paper ballot.

With the paper ballot you then wait in a second line until a booth (containing nothing but a marker pen and writing surface) is free. There are about 16 of these booths, with privacy screens behind them.

If all the booths are filled you will have to wait, BUT if you do not mind people being able to possibly see your vote you are welcome to go to a temporary booth, that is just a series of lunch tables with cardboard dividers. Less privacy, far more seats. Maybe 30-40 people can fill out ballots at once at the ward I was in.

You fill out your ballot with a black marker and bring it to the end of the room where there is a single machine. This machine does nothing but take your ballot and scan it, so the line here processes near instantly. The ballots are kept to be recounted by hand if need be, and most importantly, the machine portion of voting is not a bottleneck.

It went very smoothly today.

morsch6• 14 years ago

Thanks for sharing what I'm sure is a fairly normal experience.

It sounds very similar to the last time I voted (also in a school building), except I never experienced a line longer than, say, 2 persons -- I guess we have more, smaller locations/voter --, and of course there was no computer at the end, you just put your ballot in the box. And there were no people picketing near the location, and nobody thanked me for voting. Well, that's not true, the people inside said thanks (and so did I).

Representatives of all parties are present when the votes are counted (and recounted). We get the results in the evening, 2 or 3 hours after the elections close.

It's not entirely comparable since our ballot is quite simple, two pages with large letters, it takes about a minutes to fill out with two crosses in the right place. From what I understand you often vote on loads of things at the same time and it takes a while to fill out correctly.

notatoad• 14 years ago

>Outside of each location will be people holding signs of all candidates

isn't it illegal to campaign within a certain radius of a polling place?

amalag2• 14 years ago

Virginia is similar, with optional machine voting.

slashedzero• 14 years ago

My district in California was exactly like this, sans the people out front. This being the downtown of the capitol city, too.

iterationx• 14 years ago

you are correct it is ridiculous http://www.youtube.com/mhfm1?v=OynCgwmD-HM

philwelch• 14 years ago

In the state of Washington (not to be confused with the city of Washington; our largest city is Seattle), everyone gets the chance to vote in the privacy of their own home even weeks before the election and mail in their ballot, or drop it in a drop box. There is an outer envelope one signs and an inner privacy envelope which is left unopened until the count starts. It's possible that there are hidden shenanigans, but if there are observers for the vote-counting process I can't imagine any problems.

I have no idea why other states don't do this.

api2• 14 years ago

Americans tend to have this unbelievably naive idea that there's no high-level organized or institutional crime in their country.

dignan• 14 years ago

How many Americans do you know?

animal• 14 years ago

It's incomprehensible to me as an American how so many citizens of the country I live in are so fundamentally ignorant, but that doesn't change anything. I voted, but I honestly doubt my vote even gets counted. I wouldn't even be surprised if eventually it becomes public knowledge that the entire election process has been a complete sham and the totals mostly made up for the past few decades at least.

In any case, what am I supposed to do besides vote (at the polls - I'm all but convinced this is pointless), spend my money wisely (this is the best method I've come up with to enact some kind of change, but it's hardly effective since I'm not a billionaire), and write my "representatives" (who invariably respond with some boilerplate bullshit and go on doing whatever the folks paying for them (global business) want)?

gte910h3• 14 years ago

I hope this is a hoax.

dave1619• 14 years ago

Yeah, all it will take is a few more users taking videos from their phones of a similar thing happening, and then this things goes ballistic... especially if some people can't select Obama and Obama loses.

jff• 14 years ago

What about the other reports that mention votes for Romney being changed to Obama? It's just that "votes get switched to Romney" will make the Internet go ballistic--it's still a problem either way.

georgemcbay2• 14 years ago

I hope it is a hoax or a miscalculation issue. If it is actual fraud, I hope the people behind it are found, tried and if convicted punished to a degree warranted by what this would be -- treason.

gte910h3• 14 years ago

While I emotionally agree with you, I think overcharging is a bane on the existence of the legal system.

ditoa• 14 years ago

Looks like a calibration issue. They should have included selecting other candidates in the list. While not good enough (voting machines should be "perfect") calling it "altering votes" is a little much. It shows you that it has registered the wrong candidate, I would call this incorrectly registering input.

bibinou• 14 years ago

> I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine.

ceejayoz5• 14 years ago

If true, why not include that in the video?

danielweber28• 14 years ago

If people have been pressing that "Obama" screen region all day, it could well be worn out.

I wonder what the trade-offs are for randomizing each ballot.

hornbaker• 14 years ago

Did you read the article?

"I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney’s name and started tapping very closely together to find the ‘active areas’. From the top of Romney’s button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama’s name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein’s button was fine. All other buttons worked fine."

naveensundar2• 14 years ago

Why are those not filmed?

monochromatic• 14 years ago

None of that adds up to altering votes. It's misreading your input, which is bad enough. No reason to overstate the case though.

pacomerh• 14 years ago

Said the republican.

WrkInProgress• 14 years ago

I wish they had also taken video of them selecting Jill Stein to see if the entire machine was calibrated incorrectly or just the Romney/Obama section.

ceejayoz5• 14 years ago

Everyone's been spoiled by iPads etc., I guess. Old touch screens used to do this all the time. My Palm Pilot had a calibration app I'd have to run every few days/weeks.

If he'd hit Mitt Romney, it probably wouldn't have selected Romney but the blank region above his name.

newsoundwave• 14 years ago

He mentions in the description for the video hitting Jill Stein selects Jill Stein. He was eventually able to vote by hitting a very small area between Obama and Jill Stein.

w1ntermute• 14 years ago

> If he'd hit Mitt Romney, it probably wouldn't have selected Romney but the blank region above his name.

Wrong:

> Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney's name and started tapping very closely together to find the 'active areas'. From the top of Romney's button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama's name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein's button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.

mmanfrin• 14 years ago

> I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine.

sixothree2• 14 years ago

He describes in his comments how he touched numerous points down each of the candidates and all points registered for the correct candidate except for Obama.

That makes it not sound like a calibration error to me.

hnriot2• 14 years ago

It's so funny to see that hardly anyone actually did anything more than just watch the video. The same "oh it must have been miscalibrated" is repeated up and down the comment page.

Let's hope whomever gets elected spends money on education so that people start reading again and not just consuming the 5 second Reader's Digest version.

AmVess• 14 years ago

Uh, it's pretty clear that you didn't watch the video and didn't read the article.

Don't troll. You are bad at it.

ambiguator• 14 years ago

Seems like the obvious solution would be to close off the broken voting machine.

MartinCron11• 14 years ago

I got really into playing pinball a few years ago, and I got into the habit of turning of a pinball machine whenever it wasn't working correctly (mis-aligned flippers, whatever) so that other people didn't waste their quarters. Yes, it was kind of obnoxious. Sorry.

Anyway, a similar mechanism to say "hey, this voting machine might be screwed up, somebody check it out ASAP!" would make a lot of sense.

BlackNapoleon• 14 years ago

I saw this earlier and I noted that news agencies seemed to be reluctant to post it. CNN has been on this from the jump. I think people are afraid of it being revealed as a fake. There is some serious validation that needs to occur if this is the case.

cwe• 14 years ago

NBC News confirming they've removed this particular machine because of this:

http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/11/06/machine-turns-vote-for-obama-...

danielweber28• 14 years ago

Which is proper. The report that the volunteer said "everything will be okay" is the worst part of this. Systems need to recognize and isolate damage, not assume it will never occur.

trhtrsh12• 14 years ago

Really, intentionally disregarding a broken machine is felony election tampering. We shouldn't have bored old ladies running precincts, we should cough up for paid, trained professionals.

llambda• 14 years ago

What I've read[1][2] in regard to this incident is that it is most likely a calibration issue: i.e. the touch screen is improperly calibrated and as a result is not selecting the proper region of the screen. Now this is concerning because it likely means other machines could be or are miscalibrated. However the important takeaway here is that this is not some malicious attempt to rig the vote. If that were the case the likely method would be completely invisible from the UI; why would an attacker bother to actually show a user they were being manipulated? Of course, they wouldn't.

[1] Joseph Hall comments here, also provides a link to further commentary by him: http://gawker.com/5958114/an-expert-weighs-in-on-that-viral-...

[2] http://www.theawl.com/2012/11/the-truth-about-voting-machine...

Anjin• 14 years ago

Unfortunately no, if you read what he wrote in the comments of that submission:

Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney's name and started tapping very closely together to find the 'active areas'. From the top of Romney's button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama's name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein's button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.

naveensundar2• 14 years ago

The obvious question to ask: Why is that part not shown in the video?

Edit: Just watched the video again. The video suspiciously freezes from 11s to 18s. Probably, something inconvenient being edited out amateurishly?

hammock• 14 years ago

It's too bad that the video doesn't provide any evidence supporting that story.

ynniv• 14 years ago

The video would be truly compelling if he had repeatedly tapped from Romney to Stein. As it is, the video appears to show miscalibration, and only his testimony suggests fraud. If the video showed what he claimed, it would be lawsuit material.

scott_s4• 14 years ago

That still doesn't establish malice.

stevenwei6• 14 years ago

That doesn't actually mean anything. Resistive and infrared touchscreens (especially cheaper ones) can have all sorts of hilarious calibration errors where part of the screen area works perfectly fine, but other parts of the screen are off completely.

I used to work on kiosk software for restaurants. At the start of every day we had to go through all of the touchscreens in the restaurant and calibrate them. Sometimes they would lose their calibration halfway through the day and need to be recalibrated multiple times.

TwistedWeasel2• 14 years ago

The consumer electronics industry has shipped hundreds of millions of touch screens in the last few years and i've not seen a single article complaining that they opened up their new tablet/phone to find it mis-calibrated and that their touches were off my such a huge margin. Why are voting machines apparently subject to calibration problems that other touch screen devices are not?

ryanhuff• 14 years ago

Miscalibrated devices shipped to consumers get returned, resulting in extra costs to the retailer or manufacturer. Miscalibrated voting machines don't.

danielweber28• 14 years ago

1. Because they probably have to standardize on an older model and can't push out newer models at will.

2. Because these machines are open to the general public who are hitting the screens with their meaty fingers all day.

eli4• 14 years ago

Most likely it's the difference between capacitive versus resistive screens. If you purchased your phone based on the lowest bidding vendor, I'd bet there be a lot more problems with it too.

avolcano• 14 years ago

Not all touch screens are created equal.

I remember the old Nintendo DS touch screen, which was resistive, required user calibration where you would press on the corners of the screen. If you missed the corners (which, with the relatively thick stylus and the relatively thick bezel on the original DS, wasn't uncommon), the accuracy of your touch positions would be very notably off, to the point that using touch-screen keyboards in some games would be difficult.

Obviously I don't know for sure if this was the exact case with this voting machine, but the point being, some touch screens do require calibration and there is a chance for error. Or, of course, it could simply have been a factory mistake.

Either way, I doubt there's any malice behind this error.

jerf• 14 years ago

I have owned a ton of touch screen devices. None of them were miscalibrated, even after years of use.

I have used a ton of touch screen devices in public. I've encountered quite a few that were miscalibrated.

Public devices put up with abuse that your private devices do not.

ceejayoz5• 14 years ago

If you ever used a Palm Pilot, you've seen this sort of calibration issue. Given the state of government procurement, they're likely using that cheaper, crappier tech in most areas.

InclinedPlane• 14 years ago

This is an example where technological ignorance is dangerous because it leads to the wrong conclusions.

Multi-touch screens as used in smart phones use capacitive touch sensing technology, they do not require calibration.

Cheaper, older touch screen systems (such as those used with ATMs or voting machines) use resistive touch technology, they absolutely require calibration.

tedunangst• 14 years ago

Don't fly much I'm guessing. It's the rare checkin kiosk that is accurately calibrated.

stevenwei6• 14 years ago

The touchscreens you see in modern consumer electronic devices are capactive touchscreens. I think the iPhone was the first major device to ship with a capactive touchscreen, prior to that, resistive and infrared touchscreens were a lot more common (and cheaper).

If you've ever interacted with a touchscreen at an ATM, mall kiosk, or airport kiosk, it's likely that they were resistive or infrared based, and more susceptible to calibration errors.

ljoshua• 14 years ago

Yes, very likely a calibration issue. There was a similar instance occurring here in Colorado [1], but in the opposite direction (a vote for Romney went in as Obama). The machines definitely need to get better, but it is probably not fraud or a hack of any sort.

[1] http://www.chieftain.com/politics/pueblo-county-voting-machi...

waqf• 14 years ago

> why would an attacker bother to actually show a user they were being manipulated?

Because the person who wishes to tamper with the outcome of the election only has access to (or, very likely, skillz to modify) the calibration template (which has to be reconfigured each election, hence is modified by more people), not to the entire source code and tool chain of the voting machine. Most attacks are not gigantic conspiracies with unlimited resources.

pebb• 14 years ago

He who casts a vote decides nothing. He who counts the votes decides everything

shitlord• 14 years ago

Is it too much to ask to just completely open-source these voting machine? These machines decide the future of our country and affect the entire world. The least we could do is allow everyone to verify for themselves whether the machines are secure.

danielweber28• 14 years ago

Make sure you open-source the compiler, the firmware, the hardware manufacturing process, the assembly, the drivers, the software that built the compiler, and the software that built the compiler that built the compiler.

Or just operate under the assumption that some of the machines are compromised and make sure you have ways of recognizing faults after-the-fact.

verbatim• 14 years ago

You say this in a way that implies that it's not feasible to do such a thing. I'm pretty sure that all of those components have been open sourced in various projects, just maybe not all in the same system.

tcohen• 14 years ago

confirmed by NBC http://on.msnbc.com/TIyxAl

wbrendel2• 14 years ago

What's wrong with paper ballots again? Serious question.

In my area (northern MA), voters are given a ballot with a bubble next to each of the candidates' names. You use a marker to fill in the bubble next to the candidate you want to vote for, like 6-year-olds manage to do all the time on multiple choice tests in school. Then it gets read in by a machine, leaving a paper trail just in case.

How are these electronic voting machines any better than that? With all the technical/fraud issues surrounding them, wouldn't it make sense to just use paper?

DirtyCalvinist• 14 years ago

Electronic voting machines allow for easier customization of text for edge cases, like a need for higher contrast, larger print or another language. A good compromise, I think, would be to have the electronic machines print out a human-readable paper ballot, and that would be counted as ballots used to be. The security/checkability of the old system with the convenience of the electronic interface.

wbrendel2• 14 years ago

Those are good arguments, but are those benefits worth the millions of dollars we spend on these obviously flawed machines? It seems like overkill. Print some ballots with larger print and some in whatever languages are common in your area.

If we do have to use electronic voting machines, I like your idea of it printing a paper ballot rather than tabulating the vote inside the machine.

danielweber28• 14 years ago

How do you count a smudge instead of a complete filling-in of the oval? You have humans go over them, and people hate that.

Just because you never see this issue doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It's just that the ambiguous ballots don't matter in the vast majority of elections so no one cares.

I'm not saying computers are better than paper. They each have trade-offs.

evandena3• 14 years ago

Bubbles seem stupid to me. It's a lot easier and less subjective on review to fill in an arrow than it is to fill in a bubble. Here's an example ballot of what I'm talking about: http://www.town.oregon.wi.us/uploads/ckfiles/images/nov_06_s...

ommunist2• 14 years ago

Electronic voting machines ar much better than paper because they cost MORE!

hcarvalhoalves• 14 years ago

I wouldn't attribute to malice what can be explained by a faulty touch screen. These incidents hurt the trust on the election process, though.

The machines used on Brazillian elections are simpler but much better thought out, since it's impossible to input the wrong candidate. You have to input the number of the candidate, review his information and photo, then press "confirm" button. It doesn't present a list of candidates to choose from, so there are no biases. The US should adopt a similar machine. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Brazil#The_Brazili...

elbac• 14 years ago

How to Rig an Election: The G.O.P. aims to paint the country red http://harpers.org/archive/2012/11/how-to-rig-an-election/?s...

btilly13• 14 years ago

There have been problems like this in every election with these machines.

More troubling, exit polls and voting results have routinely disagreed with each other since 2000. In most countries that would be taken as proof that the election was not fair. But not in the USA!

http://www.ukprogressive.co.uk/breaking-retired-nsa-analyst-... claims evidence of systemic manipulation of the vote, with the trend strongly being in the GOP's favor. I have not personally verified, but it would not surprise me.

Anyone who has been paying attention this election cycle knows about the attempts by both sides to manipulate rules about who can vote, when, in ways that advantage themselves and disadvantage each other. That happens in a lot of elections but not to the extent of this one. With weird results such as, because of a recent law in Ohio, polling workers have to ASK for ID, but due to a court decision, they can't stop you from voting if you DON'T have that ID. (Confused polling workers are sure to get this wrong.)

The general trend is that Republicans want as many barriers to voting in person as possible, while Democrats want as many to be able to vote as possible. That is because more marginal voters are much more likely to be Democrat than the general population. The stated reason is "to prevent fraud" even though there is very little evidence of such fraud in practice. On mail-in ballots this reverses, since the GOP expects a large portion of mail-in ballots to be from military people who are likely to vote Republican. Fraud has been more of an issue with mail-in ballots, but obviously people are not as worried about that.

Laws get broken as well. For instance the 2000 election was decided in Florida, in part due to a voter purge that the courts decided was illegal. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Central_Voter_File for verification of that. The lesson learned is that voter purges work, which is why Florida was trying to do a purge this year at the last minute despite being warned that it was illegal. Because flipping the choice for President was easily worth the slap on the wrist they got afterwards.

There already have been laws broken this year (see http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57535950/man-charged-aft... and http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/national/fbi-launches-... for example), and everyone expects the lawyers to be gainfully employed as a result.

In short, get out your popcorn. When we exercise our right to vote, the vested interests exercise what they see as their right to manipulate the vote, and this time there is a decent chance of fireworks.

Alex3917• 14 years ago

"Anyone who has been paying attention this election cycle knows about the attempts by both sides to manipulate rules about who can vote, when, in ways that advantage themselves and disadvantage each other."

Since when have Democrats been passing laws to prevent old white people from voting?

btilly13• 14 years ago

Democrats have tried to increase the length of time early voting happens, increase the hours, and increase the number of voting locations. All of these changes make it easier for people who were on the fence about voting to vote.

They do this because they know that people who might or might not vote are much more likely than not to vote Democratic. Thus adding these people to the vote advantages themselves and disadvantages Republicans.

It is not as nasty as voter suppression, but it is no less a form of vote manipulation.

hnal9432• 14 years ago

Democrats have routinely fought efforts to cleanse voter registrations that for people that have died, moved or never existed in the first place. When votes are cast under these names, they disenfranchise legitimate voters. This is the very scam for which ACORN was driven underground.

briandear9• 14 years ago

Since when have Republicans passed laws to prevent anyone from voting?

danielweber28• 14 years ago

exit polls and voting results have routinely disagreed with each other since 2000. In most countries that would be taken as proof that the election was not fair

It's absolutely not proof. It's, at the least, evidence. Exit polls are statistical -- in my dozens of times voting, I've never hit an exit pollster.

But if you say "the exit polls disagree with the official numbers, so let's go with the exit polls" you have substituted your official election mechanism with the exit polls.

genwin6• 14 years ago

Statistics tells you the odds that the exit poll would disagree by some degree with the actual result. If the odds show, for example, only a 1 in a 100 million chance of it happening, an investigation should take place. That you've never hit an exit pollster doesn't say much, because the odds can be computed with high confidence by polling only a tiny fraction of the voters.

Statistics is highly valuable despite not being proof. For example, it's a foregone conclusion that Obama will win today, based on earlier polls. It's not certain that he'll win, but the odds of him losing are nil, the stats show.

Someone• 14 years ago

You also will have gotten rid of the idea that a vote is cast in private. A possible explanation for differences between exit polls and election results is that voters may not want to admit voting for extremist parties, or, conversely, may not want to publicly admit not having voted for party X.

cloudwalking• 14 years ago

I am a red-blooded technologist, but I think voting should be done on paper ballots. Call me a luddite, but it's just too easy to manipulate votes--either at the time of voting or in post-processing--with an electronic voting machine.

That being said, the only conceivable way to have a secure electronic voting process is to use a completely open source system. Open source hardware and software, with publicly viewable results.

danielweber28• 14 years ago

If your plan to secure the machines is to have the source be open, you have already failed. You need a system that works well even if the source has been altered.

Paper ballots have issues, too. They are different issues, and largely unseen by the general public until you have a really close election and have to use human judgment to decide whether that mark counts as a vote or not.

revelation• 14 years ago

And here I thought in the Turing year of 2012 people would finally start to understand what it means that any electronical voting machine contains a Turing equivalent machine.

No magic can make the halting problem decidable.

Peaker• 14 years ago

In really close elections, the outcome matters much less than the potential for systematic rigging of non-close elections.

cpeterso• 14 years ago

What problem do electronic voting machines actually solve? The US didn't seem to have problems counting millions of paper ballots (save for some hanging chads) until the "solution" of electronic voting machines appeared.

michaelt• 14 years ago

As I understand it the intention is to solve:

1. Allowing people with disabilities to vote. For example, headphone voice prompts for blind people, large print/high contrast for the elderly etc.

2. Making sure voters understand the voting procedure - particularly if there are multiple offices and issues on the ballot, multiple ballot papers and so on.

3. Ensuring voters' intent is recorded unambiguously. For example, you can't put marks in multiple boxes (intentionally or accidentally) and you can't leave a dimpled or hanging chad.

4. Perfect counting (assuming the data is entered correctly and the software works right) as opposed to manual counts where papers sometimes end up in the wrong pile.

5. You can offer voting in multiple languages.

6. You can randomise the order of candidates on the ballot, to evenly distribute any impact being at the top might have.

7. Ability to take backups for transit or deliver results electronically, avoiding boxes of ballots going missing.

8. Reduced counting costs and faster results, allowing more polling stations to be operated and allowing the polls to stay open later for the same result delivery deadline.

Whether it succeeds at offering these benefits, and whether they're worth the obvious cost in trust is debatable.

anonymouz3• 14 years ago

Even if this is just accidental or some weird calibration issue (weird, because it only seems to affect one button according to the report), it just goes to show how little confidence one can have in these machines. Does anyone think if they can't get the touchscreen right, the remaining parts of the system can be expected to work correctly?

The only positive thing is that such an easy to demonstrate failure might open the eyes of the less technically educated parts of the public to how bad an idea it is to use electronic voting machines.

Any suggested replacement of paper ballots comes with such a huge bag of problems (sometimes inherent in the method, and not merely problems of the implementation), and so few advantages that it puzzles me why anyone would want to introduce them.

ricardobeat3• 14 years ago

The fact that the current implementation is not reliable doesn't make the whole idea of electronic voting bad. We've had electronic voting for general elections in Brazil since 2000, with very few accusations of fraud.

anonymouz3• 14 years ago

But there are very significant issues with the principle of electronic voting:

Ideally, every voter would be able to verify their own vote after the fact via some cryptographic mechanism. But on the other hand, this mechanism should be such that the government (or another individual trying to coerce our voter) would not be able to verify the vote -- an almost contradictory, difficult requirement. I am not aware of such a method being employed in any large-scale election.

In the absence of such a method, you have a heap of problems:

1) How do you make it verifiable for the general public? Even if you accept that the general public will not be able to verify it (bad!), how would you make it verifiable even for experts? It's almost impossible to ensure that the code being run is the one you verified beforehand, especially on such a large scale, so this way is out of the question. (Remember, this is a high-stakes game, so you'd better know that your CPU in fact executes your opcodes correctly...)

2) Electronic voting & tallying opens the door for large-scale manipulation without leaving traces. If you want to remove 10000 paper ballots, you have to somehow get rid of them (with people watching). 10000 votes vanishing in a computer? No problem, just a memory operation, a bystander would never notice it.

Some of this can be dealt with by having the machine print out a paper ballot immediately after voting, and keeping those ballots. Then you're in fact using the relative safety of paper ballot voting to double check the electronic record.

swah• 14 years ago

This engineer raises some interesting points regarding our voting system (portuguese): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op9N2EyoZHo

In our country (Brazil), the electronic voting machine is strongly marketed by the government and big media as a model for the entire world to copy.

ricardobeat3• 14 years ago

I can't fathom why would you even choose touchscreens for voting machines. It's a simple interface, mechanical buttons are much better. They are more durable, offer tactile feedback and can be used by people with visual impairment.

forgingahead2• 14 years ago

This happened earlier as well during the early voting period (though Romney votes were being switched for Obama -- funny how one got coverage whilst the other didn't).

It's not some conspiracy, just a calibration error.

Source: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/03/Electroni...

forgingahead2• 14 years ago

Google cache since Breitbart is getting hammered:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.b...

zero_intp6• 14 years ago

oddly, breitbart is perhaps one of the least reputable media sources on the internet these days.

They are great if you are looking for biased, unfounded, or fraudulent "facts" to support an extractive wealth policy that exploits "undesirables"

armored_mammal• 14 years ago

Is there any evidence that what it records actually matches the screen anyway?

danielweber28• 14 years ago

There is a user-visible printed receipt that is not shown in the video.

wallacrw• 14 years ago

Is it real, and Republicans are fraudsters? Or is it a fake, and Democrats are fraudsters? Or is a Republican plant of a fake so that I believe I hate Democrats?!? Or maybe even Democrats planted an obvious fake, to make me think Republicans posted the fake, so that I'd know it's fake and end up disrespecting Republicans for the poor attempt at influencing me?!?!?!

Too confusing. I'm staying home.

donerKebab• 14 years ago

Why does this matter? The majority of votes is not the decider in this 'democracy'.

bryanh• 14 years ago

Looks like a touch screen that isn't calibrated correctly.

astrodust• 14 years ago

It's 2012. You can buy touch screens that don't need constant "calibration". These machines are using 1980s caliber technology when this was a constant problem. The last touch screen I've worked with that had this issue was CRT-based.

All these machines should do, presuming you need machines at all, is print out a receipt with the vote clearly indicated so that it can be deposited in a traditional ballot box. Leaving the tabulation a "trade secret" is really not a good idea.

kevinalexbrown2• 14 years ago

If there were one aspect of electronic voting I could change it would be the following: allow electronic votes to be reviewed by each individual at a later date, from two independent organizations. Each vote gets sent to two independent electronic counting organizations, and each let you verify your vote after the election, with an (anonymous) confirmation number issued at voting time.

If enough people cry foul to rule out a large group collectively lying or forgetting their confirmation numbers, fraud would be much easier to establish and localize. Moreover, requiring each independent database of votes to match to within some margin would also decrease the likelihood of fraud by requiring collusion between both organizations.

EDIT: Note that the confirmation number would be issued to you anonymously and sans receipt - there would be no way to prove your vote - you could have found some random confirmation number, and no recourse for a single citizen crying foul. The point, rather, is that if several hundred or thousand individuals noticed that their vote seemed to have changed, the likelihood that they were all making it up or forgetting their confirmation numbers would decrease substantially.

eli4• 14 years ago

Definitely not! It's a secret ballot -- you cannot have any way to prove which candidates you voted for.

goostavos• 14 years ago

I was not the best civics student.. What is the significance of it being secret? Being able to verify your vote seems like a pretty simple, good thing ( I would think ).

darien• 14 years ago

Federal District Judge Christine Arguello denied the existence of a constitutional right to a secret ballot. http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_21601455/federal-j...

wpietri3• 14 years ago

Yes. Proof of who you voted for is an invitation to vote-buying.

zbowling2• 14 years ago

One way hash with secret salt would work. You enter a secret password as a salt and get a hash code from all your votes so you have a provable record your vote got counted that you can verify but no body can reverse to know it's you.

Then stick all the votes up on a server somewhere. Let us go and check our votes are in the list. We could then have informal verification and audits of the counts.

scottmp10• 14 years ago

There is plenty of research and sample implementations of electronic voting schemes in which the final outcome is verifiable without anyone being able to see anyone else's vote.

As an example, I worked with Michael Clarkson on an implementation of Civitas: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/papers/civitas-tr.pdf

Jach• 14 years ago

You don't need to compromise secrecy. Are we ever going to stop complaining and call for using 3ballot or one of the any other methods? http://rangevoting.org/Rivest3B.html

kevinalexbrown2• 14 years ago

What about, e.g. taking a video of your vote as the original Reddit poster did?

I think this verification may already be a reality. The alternative is to disallow any form of verification, as with the Reddit poster, but then we lose the ability to perform checks on the voting procedure, and would never have known about this current anomaly.

What's missing, though, is the proof that who you voted for is who the vote was internally counted for.

Due to anonymity you can't individually prove a confirmation number belongs to you - you could have found one on the street or made up some random number, but if 10000 people claim that their initial vote does not match the confirmed vote, it's worth looking into more carefully.

alexshenoy• 14 years ago

What about this system covered a while back on TED: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izddjAp_N4I

msg• 14 years ago

Unless you have an absentee ballot (e.g., everyone in WA state). You give your filled out (or empty!) ballot to the mafia to drop at the polling station, with the signed outer envelope (declaring under penalty of perjury that this is your vote), and collect your reward.

I dropped off my wife's ballot. It is totally normal for one person to drop off multiple ballots at the box. It would even be hard for you to notice multiple ballots being dropped. I did our two with one gesture.

The vote buying cow has already left the barn.

So it's far more important to let citizens verify that their vote was counted accurately, with some sort of anonymizing hash.

jcurbo2• 14 years ago

This entire thread is interesting because our typical programming instincts - making sure user actions are linked to user desires via digital signatures, etc - get completely thrown out the window when you talk about voting and secret ballots. You need to be able to ensure the voter is able to make their choice independently, without pressure or publicity - but you can not perform any kind of integrity check that would link the vote back to the voter.

oh_sigh2• 14 years ago

Incorrect. You can combine a personal secret code with the output of the vote-teller in order to determine who you voted for. The vote-teller would have no way of determining who you actually voted for without your personal code. Even more secure would be to have two personal codes, one a "real" code, which outputs the actual candidate you voted for, and one "duress" code, which outputs a candidate you didn't vote for(in case someone is holding a gun to your head to confirm you voted for their candidate)

njs12345• 14 years ago

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punchscan for an example of one such system which preserves the secret ballot property.

kybernetikos2• 14 years ago

From reading the wiki article it seems that Punchscan allows the voter to prove which way they voted.

dbaupp• 14 years ago

Wow! That is a really elegant solution.

I wonder what (if any) pitfalls it has, other than the increased complexity and less obvious correctness (i.e. it would be hard to convince a non-mathematically inclined person that it works properly).

seanalltogether• 14 years ago

Or just let anyone grab a copy of the database so that any independent organization can host a lookup service so you can verify that your vote went through correctly.

briandear9• 14 years ago

Define an "independent" organization. There's no such thing. All organizations are partisan.

pippy• 14 years ago

You could give voters a receipt with the time, machine, and candidate they voted for. Checking for voter fraud would be as simple as comparing some receipts against the voter logs.

mtgx• 14 years ago

This system kind of does what you're asking:

http://www.wombat-voting.com

sebastianavina• 14 years ago

I think all the electronic machines should print a recepit, deposit the receipt on a box, and at the end of the day, count all physical votes. If they don't match the electronic machine, then audit them.

tucosan• 14 years ago

For those who are able to understand german and are not from the US, i highly recommend the newest alternativlos podcast for perspective:

http://alternativlos.org/28/

onli• 14 years ago

What do you expect? Opaque source-code, machines produced by companies linked to the Republicans, and all that in a failing state. Stuff like that was obviously going to happen.

mkhpalm• 14 years ago

Jeez, I thought HN people were sharper than this about modern technology. I'm not a Romney supporter but these voting machines are basic single touch interfaces with standard fat-finger algorithms. Lets have him pull back on the camera and show the rest of the screen. Specifically, where his other finger is at the time it selects Romney. His video is highly suspect to me.

sukuriant• 14 years ago

What show was it that discussed what would happen with a large number of very smart engineers and voting? I recall a TV show back in the day that basically said "We don't use electronic voting because it's too easy to game". I think it was one of the episodes of Sliders.

tokenadult• 14 years ago

The system here in Minnesota works much better. All ballots are paper ballots that are indelibly marked by voters. My wife and I voted this morning in our busy precinct in Minnesota, where there are some tight statewide contests about constitutional amendments and perhaps the most contested race for our state's House of Representatives of any electoral district in our state. As usual, we voted by marking bubble-shaped spaces on a paper ballot with a black pen. That provides an excellent audit trail for the voting. Machines can count such paper ballots very rapidly, and they are user-friendly for voters, and there is little ambiguity about how to vote. Minnesota has had ballots like this for at least a decade.

But even at that, when a state has a razor-thin margin in an election, it can be maddening to figure out what happened.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/11/franken-c...

http://www.factcheck.org/elections/mining_the_minnesota_reco...

The election to the United States Senate from Minnesota in 2008 was too close to call before the election, and even after millions of Minnesotans voted for one of three major party candidates, the margin between the top two candidates, Democrat Al Franken and Republican Norm Coleman, was so close that the margin was only one-hundredth of 1 percent of the votes cast in the election. That election really underscored the slogan "every vote counts."

It's quite indefensible to use a voting system that doesn't leave a literal paper trail. The technology is well proven. But what really gives most election results legitimacy and staying power is a wide enough margin among votes cast by people who show up to vote that the old saying "Vox populi, vox Dei" can apply to the result. The people speak, and even the voters who didn't agree with the plurality have to listen. It's appalling that any state would have a voting system that could obscure what the consensus of the voters is.

AFTER EDIT: Thanks for the several replies to this comment. Reading other replies posted to this thread since I first wrote this comment, I see several mentions of the systems in the Pacific Northwest states of having mail ballots mailed to voters. When I lived in Taiwan, more than a decade ago, I had a post office box there. Sometimes I would receive postal mail from the United States for the previous holders of that post office box, including State of Oregon ballots for two different Oregon voters (who were presumably each other's roommates while living in Taiwan). I always wondered, without giving into the temptation, whether I could have successfully filled out one (or both?) of those ballots and mailed them back from Taiwan to cast votes in an Oregon election. By contrast, I was never able to cast a Minnesota absentee ballot from Taiwan, even the time when I should have been regarded as having a stable permanent residence address here in the United States. So I missed out on voting in both the 1984 election and the ever-so-controversial election of 2000. I have no clear awareness of how mail ballots are authenticated as having been mailed by the voter to whom they belong (a signature on the envelope?) and hope that someone is checking to prevent those ballots from being misused.

amalag2• 14 years ago

Virginia does this as well. I think it's a great system. No need for costly machines, just optical scanners which can be spot checked by pulling a percentage to verify. Plus you can scale it very easily, just add more people for ID checking and more spaces to sit and fill in the boxes.

Virginia has both right now and a lot of people prefer to wait for the machine. I would love for them to switch completely to the paper marked ballots.

dripton• 14 years ago

We used to only have the optical scanners in Virginia. The machines are a recent addition, and a big step back. I want them gone.

digikata• 14 years ago

Yes, my county in California does this as well. A voter verifiable paper trail should be a requirement for voting systems - either as an optically read input, or a voter verifiable paper output placed into a ballot box as an audit check against the electronic results.

MartinCron11• 14 years ago

Bringing up the Coleman/Franken election reminds me of my particular pet peeve. When the margin of victory is less than the margin of error, it's impossible to know the will of the people. One hundredth of one percent is not within any reasonable margin of error.

danielweber28• 14 years ago

Yeah, we aren't willing to admit it, but every voting system has a margin of error. Even 1 in a thousand voters will have problems with completely unambiguous questions.

Symmetry• 14 years ago

In the end, if one candidate got 100,000 votes and the other got 100,001 then to the extent that we randomly select between the two I'm not sure that it really makes a difference which one wins. In this case the will of the people is that the two candidates are equally good.

"The greatest value of free elections is in all of the out-of-equilibrium outcomes that, because of the regularity of free elections, never come close to happening."

mherdeg• 14 years ago

Sure, and in scenarios like that, perhaps the best thing to do is to flip a coin.

Instead of going to all the expense of flipping a coin, though, you could just take the person who seemed to get the most votes (after you've counted them all really hard to make sure you're within the margin of error). Just an arbitrary rule, no biggie.

juiceandjuice2• 14 years ago

You're right. But for 3,000,000 votes cast, the margin of error is about 6 hundredths of one percent. At the 99% confidence level, it's .074% variance.

incongruity6• 14 years ago

I applaud your statistical sensibility, but I have a question – you're specifically looking for the margin of victory to be bellow the margin of error – but the margin of error of what, exactly?

Are you expecting the vote to be a proxy for the entire population of the country/state/whatever? Perhaps the entire population of eligible voters? Or, do you view it as simply the preference of those who took the time to vote?

Personally, I see little harm in disregarding the intentions of those who could vote but choose to not vote.

Issues of systemic inequalities in access to voting aside, I have little problem with viewing an election the task of accurately counting the votes of those who actually made it to the poling place. If you accept that concept, then the margin of error is extremely low – especially with electronic voting systems.

danielweber28• 14 years ago

The machine in question does produce a paper trail (at least when deployed in my state).

Computer systems are trying to bring forward all the hidden problems that aren't found until we have to fight about the result and put them right in front of the user. By design, they are going to show more errors, instead of hiding them from the voter.

(I shouldn't need to say this, but I'm not saying computer voting systems are better. I tend to prefer pure paper. But each system has trade-offs.)

incongruity6• 14 years ago

Computer systems can only produce a paper facsimile of the vote cast – and thus it must be checked, immediately, by the voter to verify that their intentions were recorded and reflected. Further, that paper record must itself be capable of being re-read/re-counted by different hardware easily so that the (invisible) tally of votes can be verified. In the end, you need to essentially produce a paper ballot but you burden the voter with having to check it after already having voted in a different medium. Anything short of that means that electronic votes are ripe for tampering.

Paper ballots as the canonical record can always be: a) recounted on demand while being able to verify original voter intent (to a greater extent than digital or mechanical systems) and b) digitized for redundant storage and securely encrypted.

Therefore, IMHO, if you want to ensure democracy, ballots must: show tampering, be easy to complete, easy to count (and re-count) and quickly deployable/scalable. Scannable paper is the only option that really does all of that well.

From an operations perspective (MBA/Designer here), the bottleneck in the process is the filling out of the ballot, not the scanning/recording (with any electronic/scanning system), so why not make that part scale/parallelize really easily without requiring thousands of dollars of heavy, breakable hardware? Paper is better, all around.

aaronbrethorst• 14 years ago

I'm disappointed that the LA Times story doesn't include my favorite anecdote from the Franken/Coleman recount: the person who voted for "lizard people" http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/11/23/so_w...

danielweber28• 14 years ago

I often vote for LIZARD PEOPLE as a write-in if there's one race where I don't know anything about the people in it, because of that guy. (I didn't know he had come forward until I searched for that story today.)

jrs235• 14 years ago

Wow! I can't believe they threw that ballot out! There was only one clearly marked choice!

JoshTriplett• 14 years ago

The system in Oregon works quite well. In the mail, you get a voter's pamphlet, a ballot to fill out, and two envelopes. You put your name, address, and signature on the outer envelope, put the ballot in the unmarked inner "secrecy" envelope, and put the secrecy envelope in the identifying envelope. The people counting the ballots use the outer envelope to check identity against the list of registered voters (and the list of people who have voted already), then aggregate the secrecy envelopes for validated votes; the latter get counted separately. After election day, you can check an online service to confirm that you voted, just not how you voted.

And to partly answer your question: Oregon makes it a felony to sign someone else's name to the identifying envelope.

specialist7• 14 years ago

Have you observed central count?

I think you'll be less enthusiastic once you understand how it works.

In my jurisdiction, ballots are stuffed into an image scanner (like a high speed fax) as they arrive, the votes are detected, any ambiguous votes are "electronically adjudicated" meaning workers alter the database to correct for voter intent or write ins. There's a nightly summary report, allowing people to peek at early results.

Add the problems with USPS losing 1% of all first class mail, and the lower end demographics being more mobile (changes of address), you get some real disenfranchisement issues.

It's true that vote by mail increases turnout, mostly with primary and special elections.

It's also true that vote by mail silently disenfranchises about the same number of people it enfranchises.

The correct solution is postal ballots for people who need them, poll sites for every one else. Thereby maximizing the number of people enfranchised and minimizing the number disenfranchised.

stinky613• 14 years ago

Electronic voting machines are stupid, but I don't believe that's an inherent quality. Seemingly whenever electronic voting machines make the news the underlying problem is one of gross laziness or incompetence on the part of the manufacturer. It took me hours to clean my brain off the walls when I heard about the Diebold / McAfee mashup. [1]

Las Vegas slot machines seem like a perfect archetype (to me, anyway). In trying to look up the security measures I remember from an episode of Modern Marvels I instead ended up with an NY Times opinion piece from 2004 [2] drawing the same conclusion as I. Probably (based on admittedly nothing) the measures cited have become more sophisticated and rigorous in the past 8 years.

Here are some highlights on slot machine security (as of June 2004):

* All machine software past and present are kept on file by the state

* Spot checks, spot checks, spot checks. Random and often.

* State gaming commissions are constantly looking for new ways to manipulate their machines; the article mentions firing a stun gun at a slot machine (best job ever?)

* Six month vetting process for companies and employees wanting produce gambling hardware/software

* User disputing the machine's actions has the right to an immediate investigation

Note: I am absolutely in favor of maintaining a paper trail for decades regardless of the state of digital solutions.

[1]http://xkcd.com/463/

[2]http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/opinion/gambling-on-voting...

realrocker• 14 years ago

Calibration!! Really?? Any software/hardware developer here worth his/her salt would agree that can't be it. Let's see what could have happened: 1) The Y axis of the screen was maladjusted 2) Touch Sensitivity of the screen was reduced due to incorrect settings 3) Touch area had hair/dust/oil on it. But if you read the voter's story it happened only for Obama's field. Don't they have independent watchdogs looking after this thing in United States? If shit like this went down in India, the Election Commission would have simply closed the whole damn polling booth(for the day) and arrange separate polling on a later day with extra scrutiny and security.

evan_2• 14 years ago

> But if you read the voter's story it happened only for Obama's field.

Easy explanation- the voter was lying.

stevenwei6• 14 years ago

Disagree. I've worked with resistive/infrared touchscreens for many years and this behavior is entirely consistent with touchscreen calibration errors, especially with cheap/crappy touchscreens. See my other comments here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4752605

beatpanda2• 14 years ago

This is just the tip of the iceberg, folks. If you're in the U.S. I highly reccomend being a poll worker in a contentious district in a swing state if you ever get the chance. I was in a suburb of Denver last election and saw all kinds of shenanigans, from people pulling fire alarms to clear out the polling places to people walking aaround with laptops "checking voter registration" (actually just lying to people to get them to go home).

There was also this, a few weeks ago: http://www.nationalmemo.com/man-connected-to-virginia-gop-ar...

The fact is that there is a concerted, coordinated effort to tamper with the vote every single election. I have no way of knowing whether this specific incident was malicious, but I sure wouldn't be surprised if it was.

indiecore• 14 years ago

Isn't denying someone the right to vote a crime?

beatpanda2• 14 years ago

Oh, absolutely. But whether these things get prosecuted is a highly partisan affair.

bobwaycott3• 14 years ago

Not only that, but it is grounds to apply Section 2 of the 14th Amendment. Not many people seem to be aware of the second clause. Basically, it says that any state found to be denying citizens their vote will have their representation in Congress proportionately decreased in accordance with how many people were denied their voting right.

All this nonsense about voter IDs, altering votes, making it difficult for people to vote in contentious areas (e.g., the Florida districts who have already filed suits in the last couple days) and the like should really be handled by applying the 14th Amendment. Or at least by the executive making a clear statement that it will do so.

Any attempt to disenfranchise people should be met with Section 2.

hahainternet• 14 years ago

That's just disturbing. The last time I went to vote I walked to a local school, waited politely in a queue, went and filled in my paper ballot and went home. A couple of people there were monitoring but nobody tried to influence or interrupt or anything. It was very British.

TheAmazingIdiot• 14 years ago

I can attest to similar actions as well in Nashville, IN. We've had a very nasty election cycle, given the (R) Governer has stepped down, and with the shenanigans with Mourlock (misspelled correctly; I am not an eloi).

At the polling place, there were quiet conversations and line chatter, yet was very professional and well, British.

Even when I was a poll worker during the 2000 election, it still was decent and honorable proceedings, even if the campaigning was not.

detst• 14 years ago

That's exactly my experience voting in the US. I suspect these stories are the exception but no less disturbing.

pnathan4• 14 years ago

> The last time I went to vote I walked to a local school, waited politely in a queue, went and filled in my paper ballot and went home.

Exactly my experience as well. It was excruciatingly well behaved.

sinnerswing5• 14 years ago

Votes changing From Romney to Obama in Colorado

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/03/Dozens-of...

mkr-hn5• 14 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4750429

jberryman• 14 years ago

The bigger story in VA is this one, I think:

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/va-politics/fairfax-democrats-sue-over-polling-place-observers/2012/11/01/2fb64b20-2451-11e2-9313-3c7f59038d93_story.html

There was also a NYT article suggesting that fairfax co. could end up being this election's Florida. We'll see.

maurits• 14 years ago

Can someone explain me like a five year old (european) how it is that...

You put a man on the moon, flew the space shuttle, have a rover sending holiday pics from mars, not to mention, your entire computer industrie....

But you can not make or agree a voting machine that actually works beyond reasonable doubt?!

gte910h3• 14 years ago

The issue is that we have several voting machines that DO work.

They're just not what certain states bought. Were these bought for nefarious reasons? Perhaps. Are they bad even if they were just purchased due to incompetence/graft? Yes.

melkisch• 14 years ago

If you don't want to have your vote altered. You can go on https://poutsch.com The cool thing is that the whole planet can vote there!

jordanthoms• 14 years ago

Simpsons did it... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBaX9GPSaQ

raverbashing• 14 years ago

Obligatory reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBaX9GPSaQ#t=18s

I was surprised to see how similar it was.

ommunist2• 14 years ago

Oh, how sad the vigilante cannot film the pesky RAM-inhabiting daemon, that summate counting and distributes electronic votes according to the AdSense spending of every candidate. Even the iPhone is not capable of doing that surveillance.

JoeCortopassi5• 14 years ago

I know that this will remain at the bottom of this thread, because it doesn't have enough conspiracy theory in it, but does anyone really think that this is actual vote tampering?

I mean, why on earth would you tamper with a voting machine so that it stuffs the ballot, but have it update the UI so that the user can see and report the error? This should fall to the way side of failing basic logic, but it doesn't because people want a sensationalist article to argue over. Changing votes would be much easier to do on the back end, and would have the additional benefit of never being detected by the user

VMG• 14 years ago

But what is the other explanation then?

usaar3332• 14 years ago

touchscreen calibration errors or related software glitches. I've certainly seen my own phone get screwed up enough on occasion that a touch on point x registered at y.

m_myers• 14 years ago

Hanlon's Razor would suggest a bug in the hardware or software as the more likely explanation.

Unfortunately, when politics are involved, people default to assuming malice far more than they perhaps should.

sixothree2• 14 years ago

Maybe too many people voted for Obama causing that part of the screen to fail?

rmc6• 14 years ago

That since Romney and Obama are going to each get lots of votes that the touch screen has been completly worn away and is now not very accurate.

regularfry• 14 years ago

If you assume that the team developing the software consists of more than one person, and a hypothetical vote-stuffer wants to minimise the number of people who know about the vote-stuffing attempt, they might not have any choice about who on the team actually implements the stuffing. It might be that they only have influence over the guy doing the UI.

Or it could be an attempt at plausible deniability. If all the machines need calibrating, but an uncalibrated machine just so happens to mis-register votes in the direction you want, that would give you an edge because you can guarantee that some machines won't be deployed correctly.

stevewillows• 14 years ago

In the video they should have tested for calibration. It suggests that the votes are being forced to Mitt when really the screen is just off.

Further to this, why aren't the names randomized?!

mcantelon9• 14 years ago

>I know that this will remain at the bottom of this thread, because it doesn't have enough conspiracy theory in it, but does anyone really think that this is actual vote tampering?

This exact thing happened last election. Why does it only happen to the advantage of Republican candidates?

kbutler4• 14 years ago

Posted above what I found w/ 30 seconds of googling: Same touch one candidate, other candidate gets the vote defect, same dismissive attitude from poll workers, only difference is it favored the opposite party.

jpwagner• 14 years ago

I agree. Has no one here used a touchscreen on an airplane seat before, it's usually more than one finger width offset...

huhtenberg2• 14 years ago

Re-read the article. The guy tested just for that and it wasn't a case.

bti• 14 years ago

America: Our electronic voting is just as good as our airplane seats

raldi• 14 years ago

I would have voted for this comment, but because of the implicit plea for votes in the first line, I downvoted it instead.

aneth4• 14 years ago

It may very well be that changing the UI map is the easiest way to accomplish this. Any particular person may not have access to the backend code, but may have access to the code that maps screen positions to selection.

Having no knowledge of this machine in particular, I can't say much more, but it's certainly feasible that this is the easiest or only method to modify the outcome of a vote.

Based on the description and assuming it's accurate, we could conclude that there is some sort of mapping of the display to vote selection that is configurable locally. This makes sense, as every locality has different ballots - school districts, etc.

We do know that these things tend to be pretty poorly written, so you also can't assume even reasonable or typical component design.

I don't think your logic is valid.

colkassad• 14 years ago

Plausible deniability?

tzs• 14 years ago

If I were tampering with voting, I would do it on the front end, not the back end. That's because if the code is ever discovered on the back end, it is damning. A misaligned or badly proportioned mapping from touch coordinates to ballot options is much easier to explain away as an error or incompetence.

Doing it at the front end won't flip as many votes because many people will see the incorrect registration and stab at the touch screen a few more times until they find the right spot. But some will not notice, and in a close race that could be good enough.

akjetma• 14 years ago

There are people who are so out of touch with technology that they might not understand the (to us, incredibly obvious and clear) feedback the UI is providing, and might overlook it or be scared of pressing the screen again. Grandmothers and curmudgeons.

It seems ridiculous to be unable to comprehend something that would be as familiar as using a hand calculator to people like me and you, but there are people out there who are afraid to touch the power button on their computers because they think they'll burn their house down or get a virus or something.

Imagine people like that trying to learn a brand new user interface in the span of 5 minutes while people are waiting in line for them to finish. It's a small population of people but it could conceivably make a difference given the right conditions.

edit: I forgot to add that this would be a good way to commit voter fraud and still have plausible deniability. Also, it would probably be more cost efficient to bribe someone for this small bug that gives a 0.5% advantage than it would be to pay for the campaigning that makes a 0.5% difference.

nandemo• 14 years ago

That's not the point. Yes, there might be people who will ignore the UI feedback and cast the wrong vote. The point is that, if you're going to tamper it, you'd rather tamper the back end. As it is, if this is happening to a lot of people, many of them are bound to report it and that risk completely outweighs any gain from the "grandmother" group.

In any case, I'm skeptical of the tampering hypothesis because only one person reported and filmed it.

tokipin3• 14 years ago

normally i'd agree but i don't see it out of line at all. just take a look at all the Herculean efforts that Republicans have made in the past two years to reduce the ability for people to vote

spectrum• 14 years ago

In the Netherlands they got rid of voting machines all together in 2008.

A group set out to ensure that the election process in the Netherlands would become as fraud resistant as it was before the advent of paperless voting computers. They demonstrated that the voting machines could be hacked. It wass also a risk because of the small group involved in getting the results out of these computers, with no real possibility to check if they are real (because the source code is not open). Committing fraud would only have to involve a few people.

On May 16, 2008 the Dutch government decided that elections in the Netherlands will be held using paper ballots and red pencil only. A proposal to develop a new generation of voting computers was rejected.

More info at http://wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/English

johncoltrane• 14 years ago

What exactly are supposed to be the benefits of electronic voting machines over sliping a piece of paper in an enveloppe and putting it in an urn?

scotty79• 14 years ago

Why not this http://www.ted.com/talks/david_bismark_e_voting_without_frau... ?

bratao• 14 years ago

Citing felipeko: Brazil actually has a very organized election. Aside from bad politicians we have to chose from, the election does not have many problems. We have a judicial system just for election (with judges and clear laws) ready to take actions (and they do take) when something goes wrong. All election occurs in one day, a sunday so everyone can vote, and the results usually come in less than 4 hours, because all vote is electronic.

blisper• 14 years ago

I asked for paper ballot this morning. Many volunteers are cheerful and apathetic, for them its just another gig. Lost on them is the fact this is something fundamental. Scary !!

bane• 14 years ago

"It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting." - Jumpers (1972)

nsxwolf• 14 years ago

This seems like a fairly poor way to implement voter fraud. The screen gives instant feedback. No Obama voter is going to say "Oh well, I guess I'll just cast my vote for Romney then."

If you were reprogramming the machine, wouldn't you be better off changing it to show Obama had been selected on the screen, but then print Romney onto the paper ballot? There's a better chance a voter won't bother scrutinizing the printout.

afterburner• 14 years ago

This is serious, but I'm getting a lot of amusing out of news reporters asking questions on Reddit, and have dozens of Reddit users pipe in with jokes.

short_circut• 14 years ago

It seems to me a way to mitigate this risk of part of the screen not working is to randomize the order with which the candidates are displayed. The error would presumably average itself out. Either way this is unacceptable.

csmatt• 14 years ago

A bit off-topic, but how do recounts work with electronic voting machines?

kbutler4• 14 years ago

It varies.

Some systems have a "recount" button that returns the same result as before. Others have an actual paper trail that can be recounted by hand.

FrojoS• 14 years ago

I never understood why we would go for electronic voting. I couldn't care less about the discussion here about touch screens or GUIs. Computer should have no buisnes for important, secret elections!

In my opinion the risks and downsides of moving away from pen and paper clearly outweigh any of the laughable advantages - unless of course you profit from a system that is in-transparent and manipulatable.

ww520• 14 years ago

I think a system of repeatability for voting is important. Once a voter has casted a vote, his vote should be able to be repeated without change in different systems at will to verify that his vote has not been tampered.

The system can work like this:

- Voter is assigned a unique ID, on his voting card issued upon verifying his identity. He can pick a security pin for added security.

- Voter is given a device thumb drive, RFID with some RAM, whatever storage device.

- Voter goes to a machine to vote. The machine cryptographically signs the voting result with his id. The machine writes the result to his storage device, emails him a copy, and/or puts the result on a public website. The machine also sends the result to a central server for compilation.

- Voter can go to any other machine on any other sites, plug in his result, his id, and his pin to see the voting result for verification. Voter can confirm by sending the result to central server. Or submit the signed result to third party website to display it for verification.

- If there's any mismatch, voter raises hell and demands to invalidate old vote (after verifying his identity, id, and pin), revote, and burn the tampering machine.

Edit: Id obviously means a public/private key pair.

jcmoscon• 14 years ago

LOL probably just needs to touch a little bit lower on the screen. If you're not smart enough to figure that out, you should NOT be allowed to vote.

ne0codex• 14 years ago

This seriously pisses me the fuck off. Just how the hell do we not have the technology yet for accurate touch-screen technology in voting machines?

dhughes• 14 years ago

Canadian here but I'm curious wouldn't it make sense for voting machines to have independent dual screens instead of a single screen where the possibility of a calibration error could exist?

tomflack• 14 years ago

Lower house - http://aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_Vote/Voting_HOR.htm#papers

Senate - http://aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_Vote/Voting_Senate.htm#paper...

This is how we vote in Australia. I have real trouble seeing any system of computerized voting or punch-card voting as superior having followed the United States' experiences.

What do you guys think? We use preferential-voting, so it's a little different but the idea is solid.

satori99• 14 years ago

The US uses a federal agency to collect income taxes, so why won't it do the obvious thing and create one to run federal elections?

trhtrsh12• 14 years ago

US does not have federal elections. US has state elections for Senate, Congress, and the Electoral College.

Xcelerate• 14 years ago

I'm not trying to be snarky: could someone explain to me why this is HN-worthy (or at least worth 609 points)? In an election with thousands of voting machines, the probability is high enough that at least a few of them will be defective in some way; it should be expected as far as I can tell.

shawn-butler2• 14 years ago

Unsubstantiated rumors of vote tampering via technological means on election night is the ultimate link-bait? Seems pretty clear why it is worth so many points :)

If only the specifications of the hardware and source for the software for the machine in question were available for us to analyze....

damncabbage• 14 years ago

Potential voter purging in Pennsylvania: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/11/watchdog-evidence-un...

Oregon worker altering ballots in the GOP's favor: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/11/06/oregon-election-worker...

At least one worker taking votes and putting them under the voting box: https://twitter.com/danicamckellar/status/265907196372594688 https://twitter.com/danicamckellar/status/26590774867435110

... What the hell is going on over there?

Gabler• 14 years ago

I would be more outraged if the video actually showed him tapping the other candidates to prove that they worked correctly. He says that tapping the others worked fine but there is no proof of this in the video.

LoneWolf• 14 years ago

Exactly what I thought, I have been going through the comments and seems to be something that most people don't think about, without video evidence to support what the voter says I call it lying.

mcantelon9• 14 years ago

This exact scenario also happened on video in 2008:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MHwNZkNFlI

doctorpangloss• 14 years ago

A $300 iPad does a better job than this $3,500 voting machine.

charlieok• 14 years ago

Much worse would be altering your vote without showing you that it did so

sakopov• 14 years ago

Wouldn't it be a good idea to have some sort of automated remote monitoring system which would randomly ping each machine for diagnostics data and shutdown machines if any issues discovered?

TallGuyShort3• 14 years ago

If someone had enough access to tamper with the regions of the screen and their linking to voting options, what makes you think a remote monitoring system would be trivial?

shawn-butler2• 14 years ago

All this talk of electronic voting and one-way hash, etc confuses me. I know of no aspect of the US Constitution or federal law nor the constitution of any state in which I have resided which mandates a secret ballot. It might be a tradition or something but it certainly isn't a civil right.

I'm sure there is probably mountains of state law on the issue but I would have to wager any guarantee of secrecy would be just that, provided for on a state-by-state basis. I would appreciate it if anybody could correct my misunderstanding with citations.

I think its much more important for an election result to be trusted than for it to be secret. Having both is optimal but not necessary for a valid result under the law with which I am familiar.

jrhorn424• 14 years ago

I'm not taking a stand on whether this is some weird edge case bug or whether it's a conspiracy, but I would like to point out that if it is fraud, it's an incredibly inept attempt. Using a checkbox for visual confirmation of a vote means the fraud was easily detectable. It would have been much better to mark the box for Obama but count the vote for Romney, if fraud is your goal.

Fargren• 14 years ago

Who manufactures these machines? I'm curious whether or not they may be vulnerable to Van Eck Phreaking[1]. Brazil discovered taht the machines they were going to use were vulnerable to it.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking

shirro• 14 years ago

Why does an otherwise fairly extraordinary country (space missions, amazing inventions, lots of creativity) manage to get basic stuff so completely wrong (bad toilet plumbing, units of measurement, paper currency, health care, dodgy voting). You need a proportional system. On paper. With hand counting by volunteers overseen by party reps. Stop with all the private enterprise technology stuff. Democracy is too precious to contract out to some lowest bidder. The Australian Electoral Commission runs all our ballots here and I have absolute confidence in them. Have a look at how other places run elections.

aioprisan• 14 years ago

that's nonsense, it was just a screen screwup and there's a paper trail on those machines, thank god.

jjp9999• 14 years ago

This is nothing. I was texting on my phone and it changed "Romny" to "Ronny."

Microsoft must be behind it.

readme• 14 years ago

It looks like the touch screen might need to be calibrated. This used to happen on a POS system I worked with.

I think the title is link bait. The voting machine isn't altering the vote. It's just off kilter. Besides, it's not like the user didn't know what box was being checked!

stevenwei6• 14 years ago

In my opinion, this is very obviously a touchscreen calibration issue, probably caused by the use of a crappy (read: cheap) touchscreen in the voting machine.

A lot of people are dismissing the calibration issue because of the "calibration test" the user described performing:

"Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney's name and started tapping very closely together to find the 'active areas'. From the top of Romney's button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama's name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein's button was fine. All other buttons worked fine."

However, this test does does not actually demonstrate anything. With resistive and infrared touchscreens, which are commonly used in kiosks, it is entirely possible to have some subsections of the screen work incorrectly, while the rest works correctly. Therefore the fact that some buttons work fine does not prove that the touchscreen is, in fact, correctly calibrated.

I've done a lot of work with kiosk touchscreens, and the first culprit I thought of when seeing that video was that the touchscreen was miscalibrated. The second culprit I thought of was that the touchscreen itself was faulty.

Resistive and infrared touchscreens are very prone to these types of problems, and I've seen many scenarios similar to this across hundreds of different touchscreens. (Often, just one corner of the screen will go out of wack, while the rest of it works perfectly. I've seen this happen many times.)

The only way to know if the screen was actually correctly calibrated is to re-calibrate the screen and see if the issue persists, and if it does, to replace the touchscreen itself (as it could be faulty, not uncommon among cheap touchscreens either). Neither of these steps was performed by the user, therefore he has no way of concluding that the screen was correctly calibrated. I suspect that once these tests are performed, it will be obvious that the touchscreen is to blame.

There's a lot of outrage here at the idea of the voting machine altering votes, but I think the following quote applies: never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.

The real outrage should be that these voting machines were deployed with such crappy touchscreens built into them (probably to cut costs for the manufacturer).

awayand• 14 years ago

voting cannot be computerized ever without risk of manipulation. voting will always have to be on paper in the interest of democracy.

flyinRyan• 14 years ago

Why doesn't the US just buy the system Brazil uses? In Brazil 1) everyone must vote and 2) they have strong reasons for wanting to make sure that no vote can ever be tied directly to the person who cast it.

They have such a system in place for over a decade, it works perfectly. Just buy that and use it instead of reinventing the wheel poorly.

Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

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