The dangers of e-voting (again)

[mdlbear]

Update: Problems with e-voting reported early in battleground states | InfoWorld | News | 2008-11-04 | By Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service

Problems with e-voting machines were reported early on election day in several U.S. states, including Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, which are identified as battleground states where the outcome of the vote could tip the presidential race in favor of either Democratic Sen. Barack Obama or Republican Sen. John McCain.

According to voter reports on the ground and from watchdog organizations, there were problems with getting e-voting machines up and running in these key states and others, and in some cases the machines would crash during the voting process and had to be rebooted.

Pennsylvania and Virginia were among states Verified Voting, an advocacy group focused on improving voting systems, and other watchdog organizations said they would keep a close eye on for voting problems. Neither state had early voting before Nov. 4, nor do they require paper-trail backups with the touchscreen electronic-voting machines in place at polls.

Critics of e-voting say that without a paper trail, there's no way to audit the results of a touchscreen machine, often called DREs, or direct recording electronic machines.

I'm not saying that there is deliberate fraud going on, only that it wouldn't surprise me at all, and that there's no way to detect it.

Comments

[joecoustic.livejournal.com]

Four years ago, in Indiana, I voted on a touch screen with no paper trail and was much less comfortable about it.
This year I voted with a mix of high and low tech. The forms called for blacking in bubbles (well rectangles really), so those standardized test skills were called into play once again. The forms were then fed into a machine that let you know that the forms were correct and were processed - but didn't let you see what it got out of your forms. So yes there is still room for problems but at least there is a paper trail. I'm in Ohio but am not sure how many polling sites are using this system.

[tagryn]

I think its mostly ineptitude and error rather than malice, but the implementation of electronic voting & the problems that go along with that should be of concern to all voters, no matter what "side" one is on or whether the end vote comes out for your candidates. Armed Liberal at WoC has been writing about this problem for a while.

[kyrielle]

Yep. Honestly, incompetence and bugs scare me more than deliberate fraud - because screwups (human and technical) happen no matter HOW much you plan for them not to. Deliberate fraud would be easier to conceal in those systems than with a paper trail, I assume, and that's a real concern as well...but simply the inability to prove the software worked right is bad. Things do go wrong, sometimes. It's nice to be able to figure that out and recover if it happens.

[mdlbear]

I agree completely.

[sammyd.livejournal.com]

Interesting, I live and vote in Virginia. In the the county where I live, we have the little oblong circles to fill in with ink as our way of voting. I live just south of Richmond in a fairly large county with a very large populace.

I posted about this earlier today on my LJ. Non of the people I have spoken to here in Virginia have had a problem, nor have they had to use an electronic voting machine. This is really odd that the news is reporting electronic voting machine errors and such. I suppose other counties might be. But where we live we don't have these problems.

Where we live, there are no lines, no machines, and no one telling us what we can and can't do. They just let us vote after showing an ID and telling them who we are and where we live.

I'm keeping my eyes open on this one, someone is pulling a fast one on the American public, (I think it might be the media).

[robin-june.livejournal.com]

I'm in central Ohio, and while I was elated to be able to get ahead of time my own specific sample ballot from online (*), when I was told that I had the option of a paper ballot instead of a machine this morning, I immediately took it.

(*) I live in on one town's edge, but in the next town's school district. Between school levies and bond issues, very few other people had my exact ballot. I was relieved to be able to concentrate my preselection decisions on only the races that applied to me.