Grex Agora47 Conference

Item 104: Punch the card, touch the screen, connect the arrow, check the box

Entered by polygon on Mon Oct 20 05:18:31 2003:

Here's an item to discuss voting systems.
11 responses total.
#1 of 11 by polygon on Mon Oct 20 05:19:20 2003:

Here's a link to my op-ed piece which was printed in Sunday's Ann Arbor
News:

http://www.mlive.com/columns/aanews/index.ssf?/base/news-0/106655859347062.
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#2 of 11 by tod on Mon Oct 20 15:54:15 2003:

This response has been erased.


#3 of 11 by other on Mon Oct 20 17:17:18 2003:

Even better, localized counting and cetralized counting used as an 
intentionally redundant system will highlight irregularities at either 
level.

#4 of 11 by other on Mon Oct 20 17:18:52 2003:

The tabular formatting on that page is seriously broken.  The java menu 
applet is popping up on its own and obscuring the article text.

#5 of 11 by jep on Mon Oct 20 17:53:27 2003:

I thought Larry pointed out a lot of things that most people don't 
think of.  I liked how he emphasized that many of the problems for 
elections aren't the technology of the machinery but human error.  I 
thought he has a great point (which I've seen elsewhere as well) that 
vote-counting software needs to be open and peer-reviewed.

Larry denounced touch-screen voting because it's tabulated with secret 
software, and isn't reviewable.  I'd add that touch screens wear out 
quickly.  (Visit any hands-on children's museum and just *try* to use 
the touch screen computers.)  Voting machinery is rarely used, and so 
not always well maintained.

In addition to that, I've read (here on Grex, wasn't it?) that touch 
screen voting is known to be more error-prone than even punch card 
machines.  I don't know why that was.

#6 of 11 by tod on Mon Oct 20 20:05:24 2003:

This response has been erased.


#7 of 11 by aruba on Mon Oct 20 20:54:34 2003:

Great article Larry - thanks.  I can't imagine any possible argument against
making the voting software open-source, except maybe that if anyone can
compile it, then someone could modify it and substitute a modified version
into machines right before the election.  Can anyone think of a way to
prevent that?  If the software was in some kind of ROM, that would help a
lot, but that's still beatable.

#8 of 11 by tod on Mon Oct 20 21:12:18 2003:

This response has been erased.


#9 of 11 by gull on Tue Oct 21 14:56:08 2003:

Re #7: Physical inspection, done on a random basis before, after, or
even during polling.  It might be worth looking into how the Nevada
Gaming Board keeps casinos from tampering with slot machines to lower
the payouts below legal minimums.  Also, if you have a human-readable
receipt scheme in place for voter verification, you could check a few
sample machine counts against the receipt count.

#10 of 11 by tod on Tue Oct 21 15:39:54 2003:

This response has been erased.


#11 of 11 by willcome on Thu Nov 27 08:14:38 2003:

whore.

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