Hard Evidence of Voting Machine Addition Errors 275
goombah99 writes "Princeton Professor, Ed Felton, has posted a series of blog entries in which he shows the printed tapes he obtained from the NJ voting machines don't report the ballots correctly. In response to the first one, Sequoia admitted that the machines had a known software design error that did not correctly record which kind of ballots were cast (republican or democratic primary ballots) but insisted the vote totals were correct. Then, further tapes showed this explanation to be insufficient. In response, State officials insisted that the (poorly printed) tapes were misread by Felton. Again further tapes showed this not to be a sufficient explanation. However all those did not foreclose the optimistic assessment that the errors were benign — that is, the possibility that vote totals might really be correct even though the ballot totals were wrong and the origin of the errors had not been explained. Now he has found (well-printed) tapes that show what appears to be hard proof that it's the vote totals that are wrong, since two different readout methods don't agree. Sequoia has made trade-secret legal threats against those wishing to mount an independent examination of the equipment. One small hat-tip to Sequoia: at least they are reporting enough raw data in different formats that these kinds of errors can come to light — that lesson should be kept in mind when writing future requirements for voting machines."
Re:That may be... (Score:4, Interesting)
And this will change things how? (Score:4, Interesting)
What do you think the chance of this affecting the use of voting machines is? How often is anything of great significance altered due evidence being presented that it is inadequate?
Rationality is on the defensive. It certainly doesn't have much place in public policy any more. In every aspect of life, people are being convinced that the universe is not subject to laws which can inform our actions by predicting consequences, but that we are at the mercy of outside forces beyond our understanding, let alone control.
The 'Invisible hand' of the market means we must accept everything capitalism throws at us. The 'Intelligent designer' controls all life and we must not meddle with it. The natural rhythms or the Earth/Sun are responsible for global warming, so environmentalism is futile.
In the face of such a widespread campaign to render people helpless and reason impotent, no amount of evidence will achieve anything.
Re:My Question (Score:3, Interesting)
As for how much they diverge, that's exactly the problem: we don't know, and attempts to find out have resulted in stonewalling and threats.
Re:That may be... (Score:1, Interesting)
Sorry man, but the Dems have proved themselves incapable of running elections more than once.
And did you look at the vote totals? Less than 300 votes cast. Don't they test these machines themselves? You could put 300 test votes through that in less than an few hours easy.
Here is the real smoking gun... (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1267 [freedom-to-tinker.com]
"Let's assume the Democrat party is assigned option switch 6 while the Republican Party is assigned options switch 12. If a Democrat voter arrives, the poll worker presses the "6 button followed by the green "Activate" button. The Democrat contests are activated and the voter votes the ballot. "
Then the following comment nails it:
"Rich Kulawiec Says:
March 20th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
I'm working through this explanation with a paper-and-pencil mockup, but meanwhile I'll note Sequoia's use of the right-wing code phrase "Democrat Party" instead of "Democratic Party". It seems to have become fashionable of late among some to use this term as a thinly-veiled insult, then deny that it's intentional. Given how carefully [at least some portions of] this explanation seem to be worded, I don't for a moment believe this is a mistake."
lots of stuff going on (Score:5, Interesting)
Another plausible error mode here is the one the ES&S ivotronics had (and ones with old firmware still have). Certified voting machines are required to redundantly store the votes, usually 3 times, and there may be some effort to have these in different memory modules.
A while back ES&S had a bug that was triggered by a low battery voltage. The low battery condition would cause the logger to report this in the log. However the log entry was too long and cause a buffer over flow that over wrote the header of one of the redudant vote files. When the votes were read out at the precinct the machine did not notice the corrupt header and a second programming bug caused the malformed headers to cause other problems including mis-reported various things (like the maching ID) which then caused all sorts of downstream problems.
When the votes were read out by another method the corruption of the primary vote file was detected and it silently failed over to the secondary record. This produced a vote report that did not match up with the first one.
A reveiew of multiple systems was done by the Florida election supervisor who estimated about 1 in 7 machines reported wrong. He was fired.
Re:I've just got to ask... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:That may be... (Score:2, Interesting)
What is your resounding solution to the problem!? And don't say Anarchy or extreme Libertarianism which are
both cop-outs to the supposed problem.
Paper Ballots were fine until people starting stuffing boxes when no one was looking. Then we didn't bother to
compare totals between people and ballots. Then we tried to get fancy thus dangling chads and vague complex results.
Don't get started on the whole Supreme Court ruling in 2000.
We just need something simple to register out vote. Keep it secure from tampering and be able to accurately verify
a vote in the event of a recount. If you believe this can be done with a paper receipt, so be it. Just remember,
the average poll worker age is around 72. Don't make it too complicated or there will be errors. If you design
voting machines or systems, ask yourself: Can my mother/grandmother work this?
You want to talk about them damn politicians socially engineering the public?
How about coming out of your shotgun shack, stop typing your manifesto and help work towards fixing the problem.
People collectively are dumb panicky animals.
Individually the majority are actually quite intelligent. I've seen exception, but the rule usually holds true.
People don't want to know about or pay attention to politics for two reasons:
1) They are tired and frustrated of it
2) They don't want to be bothered learning about it
Easy plain text education would help the people suffering from the No. 2 problem.
Broadcasting alternative reasonably unbiased locations where at least voting/candidate information can be found.
This information is desperately needed at everyone's local elections.
The Internet has been helping with this. I'm not saying blogs or podcasts, but look at the discussion we are having right now.
Even websites that post a small profile of candidate and their views made my local election vote a more educated vote.
Major media networks had their time to distribute this information.
They can no longer provide information in an accurate or unbiased fashion.
A viable third political party would help. I've been harping on
When I talk about viable party, I mean a political party that can have primaries in all 50 states if it so chooses.
A party that is able to accept members like the other parties at any courthouse rather than registering 'Independent'.
Also I mean a party that is an actual aggregate of it members' interests in a grassroots fashion and doesn't have
a polarizing agenda like the Green or Libertarian party.
A great number of people suffering from the No. 1 problem might welcome a party that isn't bought and proposes ideas
that make sense. I would cite Ron Paul, but you can't start in the current political morass with ideas that radical.
Now that my rambling is over what does anyone else propose?
Re:How OVC system works (Score:3, Interesting)
They can take a picture of a ballot, and use another one to deposit.
Nothing to blackmail against, give bonuses for, etc.