Ask a "Star" of HBO's Voting Machine Documentary

Herbert H. Thompson, PhD ("Hugh" to his friends), is one of the people featured in the HBO documentary, Hacking Democracy, that Diebold tried to keep from airing. Hugh is a long-time Slashdot reader who called me to volunteer for this interview — on his own, not through anyone's PR department. Here's a YouTube excerpt from a CNN Lou Dobbs show with Hugh in it. (Find more articles by and about Hugh here. And perhaps check this brand-new MSNBC story about e-voting, too.) Hugh suggests that you give him "your wildest questions about what went on behind the scenes and how safe the e-voting systems actually are." Let's take him up on that challenge, hopefully while following Slashdot interview rules. Note to Diebold and other voting machine companies: We welcome comments and questions from you, same as we welcome them from everyone else. If you feel you are being vilified unfairly by Slashdot readers, please respond and set the record straight.

Re:Pen-and-paper voting

[Arbitor Elegantorum]

In many jurisdictions, like mine, they do put an X next to somebody's name, and then slide the ballot into a scanning machine which counts the votes. However, the issue of returning to a 1920's style all-manual system is the count, the crucial part of the system. In Canada ballots have only 3 or 4 party names listed. Its easy to count those. In Chicago, we will have nearly 90 names on the ballot. The possibility of mischief or mistakes increases dramatically when you let humans do it.

Re:paper trail?

[jj00]

Pittsburgh (Allegheny country) had a public review of 4-5 voting systems (Unisys, Sequoia, ES&S, and Diebold) that I attended. Of all the systems I saw, ALL of them had an option to produce a paper trail. Some were inherently better at paper trails than others - such as the bubble-fill versions, but they all had some sort of option.

Most of the salesmen there seemed to steer you away from the bubble-fill devices, stating that they were cheaper up front but would cost more in the long run with paper costs. I still liked them the best. They have multiple ways of recovering from problems - built in paper trail, still work under power outages, and anyone that can play the lottery can use them.

I took some pictures if you're really interested. [flickr.com]

By Request: Issues with Pen and Paper voting

[Anonymous Coward]

What, exactly, is the argument against pen-and-paper voting? It seems to me that everybody wants to migrate to voting machines - electronic or mechanical - but so far nobody has explained to me what's wrong with good old-fashioned "put an X next to your candidate's name" voting.

Paper ballots have their flaws, trust me! We went through a very hotly contested municipal election one year.
The biggest issue lies in how you count "spoiled" ballots.

Everyone is supposed to put an X next to the candidate's name, specifically, a clearly marked X that entirely fills the box from one corner to another. Not everyone does that.

What if they circled their choice instead of marked an X? Does that vote count, because the "intent was clear"? Or is it a spoiled ballot?

What if they marked an X, but one of the lines of the X doesn't reach the corner of the box? Does it get thrown out on a "technicality" as a spoiled ballot? Or is it a case of "obvious intent" to vote for a candidate? What if there are two Xs, one fainter, and one darker? Is the darker on the "real choice"?

There are two underlying principles for handling ballots, and both have some sort of legitimate argument. On the one hand, if a ballot is in any way incorrect, according to the formal rules, it should be thrown out. Especially for elections, it's important that all parties involved play by the rules.

On the other hand, the point of an election is to find out what the voters want. Even if my X doesn't have perfectly straight lines, or the tip of one line doesn't quite meet the exact corner of the box, the vote I wanted to cast is clear. We don't want to take away someone's right to a vote just because they didn't mark the paper quite right.

What's more, what if the reason my X is shakey is because my hands tremble? I could be old, or have cerebral palsy, or just be really high strung. My vote shouldn't be discounted because of a minor physical handicap. For that matter, my vote shouldn't be discounted because of a major physical handicap; and it's dealing with tricky issues like "how do we grant the only blind man in town the power to cast his ballot anonymously" that complicate voting systems. Obviously, asking someone with poor vision to mark an X on something he can't see doesn't work very well...

Paper ballots have advantages, but they're not a silver bullet. My municipal election ended up with *three* people initially claiming to have won the right to be mayor; each one based on a method of counting the ballots. In some sense, all three had a valid claim; but eventually, the scrutineers made their rulings on each ballot, and a final, somewhat arbitrary winner was chosen to be the mayor.