Voting Machines Wreak Havoc in Maryland Elections

An anonymous reader writes, "Voting machines are wreaking havoc in Maryland elections today. From the article: 'Election Day in Montgomery County and parts of Prince George's opened in chaos and frustration this morning, as a series of problems and missteps left thousands of citizens unable to vote or forced to cast provisional ballots... Montgomery County's Board of Elections held an emergency meeting and agreed to petition the Circuit Court to extend voting times until 9 p.m.' It's simply shameful."

User Error

[IPFreely]

It's all User Error on this one.

The people setting up the system forgot to bring along required material to the voting places. Big Oops! Once the material was brought in, it worked fine.

This has nothing to do with voting machines. It would have been the same if they forgot to bring the paper ballots to a voting location that was using paper ballots instead of machines.

Move along.

DECEPTIVE ARTICLE, User Error

[neonprimetime]

because of a glitch that left computerized voting machines across the county inoperable.

Boxes of automated voting cards that are required to work the electronic machines were mistakenly left behind in a Rockville warehouse in the run-up to Election Day, elections officials said

The cards began to be delivered by shortly after 7 a.m. and had been dropped off at all polling stations by 9:50 a.m., election officials said, and voting returned to normal

It doesn't sound like machine error, but instead stupid user error.

Re:User Error

[slackmaster2000]

"She said precinct workers began calling the board's officers at 6:15 a.m. to report that the cards -- which function like ATM cards and are handed to each voter as he or she arrives at the polls -- had not been delivered. Voters are supposed to insert their cards into the electronic voting machines so that the correct ballot will appear on screen. Without the cards, the voting machines cannot work."

If they were able to remember to deliver paper ballots to the polls, then they should be expected to be able to remember to deliver voter cards.

Old: piece of paper.

New: piece of plastic.

This has little to do with newfangled technology. It's just a transition period while everyone adjusts to the new system. I'm sure that by the next election there will be a sticky note on somebody's desk that reads: "Remember to deliver plastic cards to polls."

Not All User Error (RTFA)

[raehl]

The article does focus on the machines not working because the cards you need to run them were not brought to the location. That's definitely user error - you wouldn't say paper balloting was broken if you forgot to bring the ballots.

But, towards the end of the article, there is this:

Louise Bradley said she arrived at her polling station after the electronic cards had been delivered, but her card did not work properly. When she got to the section of the ballot listing candidates for the Democratic central committee, it was already filled out. Bradley said she had to remove the computer's choices and insert her own.

Now *THAT* is a problem with electronic voting, and a severe one.

Not all about user error

[smooth wombat]

From Page 3 of the article in Howard County:

Poll workers found that screens on new electronic poll books froze or shut down as they tried to record arriving voters.

Note that these are the books which are supposed to record who has shown up. In other words, there may not be a way to verify who showed up and voted and in some cases people might be able to vote twice.

Also from Page 3:

At Luxmanor Elementary School in Rockville, Larry Schleifer cast a provisional ballot, then groused that it would not be counted along with the electronic tallies expected later in the day. He said he was frustrated that no one had crossed his name off the voter registry when he was handed a paper ballot and was concerned that election workers would not keep track of who had done what.

"What's going to stop somebody from voting twice?" he fumed. "I think it's unconscionable that this has happened."

See my above quote regarding double-voting.

Continuing from Page 3:

Bernice Wuethrich, voting at Grace United Methodist Church on New Hampshire Avenue, said she cast her ballot on the electronic machines after they were up and running. But even then, she said, not everyone's name was coming up on the computer.

"They don't have a printed list" of eligible voters, "they don't have a backup," Wuethrich said. "So when the computer goes down, they can't even look at a list to see who's eligible to vote."

Hmmm, no paper trail to verify who can vote. Sounds suspiciously like the call for a paper trail for your actual vote.

Still futher on:

Louise Bradley said she arrived at her polling station after the electronic cards had been delivered, but her card did not work properly. When she got to the section of the ballot listing candidates for the Democratic central committee, it was already filled out. Bradley said she had to remove the computer's choices and insert her own.

So anyone who didn't notice the selections could have inadvertently cast a wrong vote. Yes, this is user error but also computer error. There should never, EVER, be any selection already chosen when one uses an electronic machine.

The issue is both user error, for forgetting the cards, but also programming and equipment error on both voting machines and registration books. I can't wait for the lawsuits to fly after this fiasco. If nothing else hopefully this incident will encourage more people to force their officials to have paper ballots which can always be gone back to to be counted.

I'm not sure why one even needs an electronic registration book. The big paper ones we use in my area have worked since I was able to vote (a few decades in case you were wondering).

Re:(sigh)

[cHALiTO]

Well, in Argentina voting is mandatory, which means around 15-20 million votes, and they are usually counted in 1-2 days at most, with witnesses of different parties, etc.
It's quite simple, really.

Re:(sigh)

[pdschmid]

I just don't buy that argument. In Germany, all voting is also paper-based only and everything is counted by hand. Polls close at 6 pm and we generally have firm results the latest around 10 pm. The morning newspapers the next day have the preliminary official result on the front pages. The final official result is only available several weeks later, but that is the same in the US (election results are officially certified by each state's Secretary of State in the weeks after election day). The process in which votes are counted in Germany scales perfectly well (each precinct counts its own ballots, then reports the results to the county from where it goes to the state level and then finally to the federal level): Elections didn't suddenly take longer to count after we added 16 million citizens through the reunification.
Just to add some data: In the 2004 US presidential elections, 122,293,548 valid votes were cast. In the 2005 federal elections in Germany, 48,044,841 valid votes were cast. Germany has 16 states.

Re:Havoc

[Anonymous Coward]

I would indeed say that by crippling the ability of a democracy to have reliable and trusted elections, voting machines are indeed causing "great destruction or devastation; ruinous damage" to the democratic process. This may not show up as physical damage until later; but it's just as dangerous if the violence occurs after the democratic process fails..

Re:(sigh)

[OldeTimeGeek]

Yes, it could be hours if it was a simple election, but in California, it would be upwards of a day. At least.

Between candidates for constituional offices, local offices, statewide ballot propositions, local measures and all of the other things that were given to the people to voter on, the last California ballot had between 15-25 separate items. And that was just a gubernatorial primary. Multiply that by the thousands of precincts, and you've got a long wait.

Re:(sigh)

[Intron]

The area I live in has optical mark cards. Make an X, put it in the box, the box has already counted it by the time I'm out the door. It's as fast as using a computerized system where flash cards have to be carried to a central reader and counted. If they want to recount, they can take the ballots out of the box and run them through again, or look at them and count them by hand.

The real reason for using the computer systems is to save the cost and time required to design and print paper ballots, not to speed up the vote count

Re:(sigh)

[chgros]

How many candidates per piece of paper? How big should each candidate's name be written? In what ORDER should the names of the candidates be written? When are the ballots printed?
In France, there's one candidate per piece of paper. There are piles for each candidate; you're supposed to take several to keep the secret (you're also getting some in the mail). Put one piece of paper in the envelope (in secret), put the envelope in the box (in front of election officials). I've never heard of voter fraud in France (doesn't mean there isn't any though)

Re:The people that RUN them are the problem

[Waffle Iron]

I really envy you that you didn't lose any minutes of your life watching coverage of election commission workers in Florida holding up paper ballots to the light

Those were punched cards. That's simply another example of inappropriate application of computer technology to voting. (Punch cards were designed to be written with card punch machines, not by random members of the public blindly poking a stick into little holes.) That doesn't imply that *proper* paper ballots have any problems at all.

Re:(sigh)

[rblum]

When was the last time that every news agency in the world focused on the voting in Germany, France, or UK? The US is under a spotlight and a microscope in everything it does.

Well, pretty much all of Europe follows European voting - and U.S. voting. Sorry you guys don't care about the rest of the world, but I can't quite see how that justifies vote fraud)

The point is, these European countries manage just fine to vote on paper. Elections for the European parliament are done on paper, too. And to top it off, votes are counted extremely rapidly - the first precincts report within 30 minutes or so, pretty accurate numbers within two hours, and usually you have the results within a day at most.

Explain to me again why we should use electronic voting if the manual alternative works better *and* is more tamper proof?

Re:If it isn't broken...

[Detritus]

The United States has a long and glorious history of election tampering, even when paper ballots were the norm. If you can't think of multiple ways to tamper with paper ballots, you don't have a very good imagination or sense of history. Many of the most notorious political machines used paper ballots for their elections.

Irresponsible summary

[Peter Mork]

Holy incomplete journalism, Batman! The delay was not because of computer problems. The delay was due to incomplete packets being sent to the polling locations. This could happen with computerized voting, with paper ballots, or with clay tablets. The organizers forgot to include the plastic cards that are inserted into the voting computer. If this were purely paper-based, it would be like forgetting to include the lock for the ballot box.

Caveats: I may not be a lawyer, but I do live, vote and electioneer in Montgomery County. Also, please don't interpret this post as an indication that I like computerized voting---I deplore Diebold and any voting scheme they support. But, I won't throw my vote away by staying home. Finally, I need to get back out there, so my apologies if this is redundant.

Two good schemes

[lemaymd]

I concur that computers can bring a lot to this particular table.

I'm not a voting expert, but one of the most exciting possibilities to me is the chance for people to start voting their minds with respect to third parties. Currently, you're only allowed to vote for a single candidate in each race, which in a two-party system causes people to often vote for the "lesser of two evils." Once computers are responsible for counting all votes, people should be able to start saying "I really want to vote for X third party, but if X loses, I'd like to vote for Y major party instead." Running an election like this would be difficult for humans, but computers could handle the job.

Regardless, there are two high-quality voting schemes from renowned cryptographers that show some real promise for the future, even though they're not yet practical.

In "A Verifiable Secret Shuffle and its Application to E-Voting" Andrew Neff describes a protocol "to verifiably shuffle a sequence of k modular integers" to represent a ballot. He relates the protocol to the problem of achieving a random, yet verifiable permutation of some input sequence, like a card player who has verified the composition of a deck of cards before they are shuffled, and yet doesn't know the ordering of the cards after they've been shuffled. Normally, the auditor must be able to see all of the input values during the audit, but in an election this is obviously undesirable (because then the auditor [vote buyer] knows how the affected individual voted). Of course, I can't present all the details here, but the basic principle of the system is that there are a number of rows each containing a fixed number of pairs of 1-bit El-Gamal ciphertexts. Each row represents a candidate. In the row representing the candidate that the voter selected, each pair of encrypted numbers is homogeneous, they are 0-0 or 1-1. In the other rows, the numbers are heterogeneous: 0-1 or 1-0. Of course, the encryption obscures these relationships in the machine's output. So, how does the voter know that the proper vote was cast by this black box? For each pair of bits in the row corresponding to the chosen candidate, the machine produces a pledge bit that specifies whether that pair of bits is 0-0 or 1-1. After the machine has printed the receipt with the ciphertexts, the voter dictates to the machine whether to expose the randomness for the left or right bit in each pair. Since the bits are supposed to be the same, it shouldn't matter which side is opened. However, if the machine cheated, and the pairs in that row are heterogeneous, then there is an exponentially decreasing probability that the voter will not choose the side that corresponds to the value the machine committed to for that pair. This complicated scheme of ciphertexts and challenges is necessary to prevent vote buying, see the paper for all the details.

Another scheme was devised by David Chaum in "Secret-Ballot Receipts: True Voter-Verifiable Elections." This scheme uses double-layer transparent receipts that use "visual encryption" to encode a voter's choice on a ballot by printing specially-organized checkerboard patterns that overlap to form big letters visible to the voter. However, when the voter leaves the booth, they separate the two layers and only keep one as a receipt. Both layers look completely random when separated, so they again are resistant to coercion and vote-buying. There's some heavy crypto at work in this scheme, too, so you'll have to read the paper for full details.

Both of these schemes post all of the ballots to a public bulletin board so that voters can verify from home that their votes were counted-as-cast. However, they still have some flaws, most of which stem from human factors (humans aren't very dependable participants in cryptographic protocols). They also introduce some potential subliminal channels that could be used for voter coercion, since ballots are posted in a modified form to a public bulletin board. A full analysis of those problems is pre

Re:(sigh)

[israfil_kamana]

> I'm sure that works great in Canada, but we have more than 4 people who live here. Also, we have electricity, so we can power our counting-machines.

Ok, yuk yuk. Very funny. However, compare Canada with an equivalent population, say, Florida (remember 2000). Some 10,000,000+ votes cast in our election, all on paper, counted within 8 hours. We knew who our government was the same day. No supreme-court injunctions.

Part of the problem is resolved by a simple paper vote with a clear big circle to mark an X, but a large part of the differences between our countries are two-fold:

1. Canada has an arms-length, non-partisan elections commission. It draws boundaries, elimintating almost all gerrymandering (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering [wikipedia.org]), and organizes electioneers, ballot-counters, and other people and processes necessary for elections in each electoral district (riding). Parties get no special recognition or representation and are not allowed to interfere or influence the process.
2. Canada has federal electoral standards and laws, so one province doesn't vary widely from another. The USA has state legislation to cover elections, so a given state can decide for itself how it wasnt to elect its representatives to Congress. While this fits with the original concept of the United States, it creates a very large variance in process which is really hard to audit and guarantee that one American's voice is as valid as another's.

Cheers,

Re:Two good schemes

[the_womble]

Currently, you're only allowed to vote for a single candidate in each race, which in a two-party system causes people to often vote for the "lesser of two evils." Once computers are responsible for counting all votes, people should be able to start saying "I really want to vote for X third party, but if X loses, I'd like to vote for Y major party instead."

You do not need computers to do this.

This type of voting (there are several types of transferable vote system) is used to elect the European Parliament, the Mayor of London, the Australian senate, the president of Sri Lanka, the Irish Parliament. I have voted in two of these on ballot papers that were obviously intended to be hand counted. Single transferable vote systems were also used Denmark, as well as in Tasmania, long before computers were invented.

Re:Why oh why oh why ...

[Tim Ward]

We don't do most of that in the UK - we have what is called a "representative democracy" which means that you elect people to represent you, and they then make the decisions rather than running back to the electorate for each little thing.

As an example, we most certainly do not elect judges! In the UK judges are non political, and we want people who are good at being judges, not people who are good at winning elections. Similarly "city officials" are appointed by normal recruitment processes, with elected local politicians taking part in the process when hiring senior officials.

Re "taxes/bonds/ordinances", referenda in the UK are very rare. We elect the politicians to make these decisions for us. If we don't like how they do it we throw them out. Having said which, as a politician I am involved in endless consultation with my electorate to find out what they think on various issues, but these are not elections.