The concept behind voting is simple. You go in, you make your choices, and they’re counted to see who wins what.
As in recent years, Election Day in 2006 was anything but simple. Aside from the results themselves, here are just a few things that went wrong this year.
The big thing that went wrong all over the country was the use, or should I say attempted use, of electronic voting machines.
In several states, poll workers had trouble starting the machines, and in many places, such as Indiana, just gave up on the machines entirely and started using paper ballots.
“Only three people had voted when all 14 machines stopped working” in District 23A in Broward County, Florida. “I have two words for them — paper ballots!” election volunteer John Miller, 78, told the Miami Herald.
In Denver, officials said the new electronic voting system was “overwhelmed.” Lines at some polling places were so long that Bill Ritter, a Democrat who ultimately won the governor’s race in Colorado, even went so far as to bus voters from one polling place to another so they could vote before polls closed.
In New Jersey, electronic voting machines refused to register votes for Republican Senate candidate Tom Kean Jr. “Voting machines appear to be pre-voted, that is when one voter leaves, you can reach in behind the machine, push a button and that sets up a pre-vote for the next voter who comes in,” Republican National Committee spokesman David Norcross told WABC-TV. I told you they would start complaining when it affected them.
In many other states, though, the machines acted in the opposite way: They refused to register votes for Democratic candidates, and “flipped” them to Republicans, no matter how many times you touched the Democrat’s name on screen.
In several places, voters received automated calls that seemed intended to intimidate them and keep them away from the polls. Virginia election officials said several voters in the counties of Arlington, Accomack and Essex, as well as some in the city of Hampton, were told by callers that their polling places had changed or that they were registered in another location and would be arrested if they tried to vote.
“It was pretty clear that this was not one random voter receiving a phone call, but there were calls going on in multiple places,” said Barbara Cockrell, an assistant secretary for elections with the Virginia Board of Elections. — New York Times
In other states, new identification requirements confused voters who weren’t prepared for them.
South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, who is up for re-election, went to vote, and was denied, because he had forgotten to bring his voter ID card. He came back later and was allowed to vote.
Chelsea Clinton, daughter of former President Bill Clinton, showed up to vote and was told she wasn’t registered to vote. She was allowed to cast an affidavit vote, a type of provisional ballot. As it turns out, the voter registration book had been sent to the wrong place.
Some people expressed their frustration in less civilized ways. A man in Pennsylvania took a metal paperweight and smashed an electronic voting machine. A Kentucky poll worker was charged with assault after attacking a voter whose ballot wouldn’t feed into the optical-scam machine. And Madison’s (Wis.) incompetent mad bomber called in a bomb threat, closing one polling place.
The Election Protection Coalition had recorded over 17,000 complaints about electronic voting machines across the country to its toll-free number, 1-866-OUR-VOTE, by late Tuesday night. Common Cause had received 14,000 additional calls by Tuesday afternoon, the New York Times reported.
And I probably haven’t hit one tenth of the problems in this brief roundup.
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BelchSpeak
Nov 08, 2006
Over 100 Million voters went to the polls yesterday. There were a few glitches, but the problems did not even amount to .001% of the registered voters. Whether or not you use a paper ballot, mechanical or electronic, there will be issues at the polling booths.
I, and all of your readers, will report that voting went off without a hitch. I ask that you stop treating electronic voting machines as some kind of cupacabra monster that will produce errors more often than a valid vote.
BelchSpeak
Nov 08, 2006
Michael,
You ask how I knew that an electronic vote actually counted? I have faith in the system. Paper ballots provide no more assurance that they are counted correctly than an electronic one. Nor do the old mechanical flip switch machines.
There is a movement in this country to undermine the legitimacy of American Votes by claiming that the system is faulty. I reject that notion and you should too.
There has been zero documented proof that electronic votes have been misappropriated in any US election.
BelchSpeak
Nov 08, 2006
First, understand that it is the LOCAL governments responsible for reporting accurate polling data to the state and federal government. (There may be state regulations in play too, depending on where you live.) You have a problem with your voting methods? Take it up with City Hall.
If you have electronic voting machines, then it means that careful deliberations took place at the local level to implement what they believed and voted to be the best method.
You leave it to the experts to provide proof of tampering? They have no proof, but then tell you its a perfect crime? I am an expert in cyber security. I trust the electronic machines. As an expert, Im telling you there is not a shred of proof that electronic votes have been misappropriated.
You trust so-called experts, but not your own neighbors in your own voting district to run a fair polling booth? The Democratic victories annoy me too, but the people have spoken and the voices were counted fairly.
Louise
Nov 08, 2006
I voted in Jacksonville,Florida, and had no difficulty at all. I used a ppap
Louise
Nov 08, 2006
I voted in Jacksonville,Florida, and had no difficulty at all. I used a paper ballot.
Michael Hampton
Nov 08, 2006
And how do you know your vote was counted? The problems with these machines are significant and have been well documented for years.
Maybe your Republican vote actually went to the Democrat. You’ll never know.
The irony is, we already have the technology which would allow any voter to verify that his own vote was recorded correctly. What we don’t have is the political will to deploy it.
Michael Hampton
Nov 08, 2006
With all due respect, having faith in the government is exactly what we are NOT supposed to do in the United States of America.
Faith in the election is doubly stupid when means exist to ensure the electronic voting machines aren’t tampered with, but the government doesn’t want those means.
As for documented proof of vote tampering, I’ll leave that to the experts. But the experts tell me that it’s a “perfect crime” scenario. You can rig an election and leave no trace in the electronic (!) records.
Maybe when it wasn’t possible to ensure the integrity of an election, one needed faith in the goodness of the people counting the votes. This is no longer necessary.
And maybe all the Democratic victories are annoying me a bit too much…
BelchSpeak
Nov 08, 2006
Yeah, Im an expert and I looked into its security. Far from your description, they are not “horribly insecure.”
The voting machines were purchased with federal funding, but it was up to the localities to determine which method and machine to go with.
I did not “deride” any other expert, but I will point out that they may have an agenda to undermine the American electorate’s faith and credibility in the voting system. I never claimed that the voting machines were tamper-proof. But they are just as tamper resistant as your ATM machines and your gas pumps.
Paper ballots are not tamper proof. I can set them on fire. Mechanical voting machines are not tamper proof. I can jam a crowbar into the gears. Electronic machines are not tamper proof. I can tamper the lock, foul the memory and misalign the touch screen sensors.
You can choose to believe the government is out to fuck you over, but that is not how I and most normal people choose to live. I urge you to not give into the womanly hysteria over these machines, given that there has never been any proof that the votes have been stolen.
Michael Hampton
Nov 08, 2006
You’re an expert in “cyber security”? Are you even for real? Have you not even bothered to look at how horribly insecure these machines are? What makes you trust these machines, knowing just how insecure they really are?
The local governments bought the electronic voting nightmare machines because they were required to do so by the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002, in hindsight a very poorly named act.
The “perfect crime” means that the criminal committed the act without leaving any recoverable evidence whatsoever to tie him to the act. The REAL experts here, who you have derided, have repeatedly demonstrated several ways to do this with various different electronic voting machines. This may be even more perfect, since nobody would necessarily even suspect a crime took place.
As for my local poll workers, I trust they’ll be as utterly confused as they always are when dealing with Windows computers in their normal state of being: on the fritz.
Michael Hampton
Nov 08, 2006
I can’t open an ATM machine with a very common key you can buy on eBay.
But I can open a voting machine with such a key.
That’s not “just as tamper resistant” by any measure I can think of.
All you need is a hotel minibar key and a specially written program, at least two of which already exist, and you can steal an election in under 60 seconds. Nobody will ever be able to prove anything.
That isn’t hysteria, it’s fact.
BelchSpeak
Nov 08, 2006
You can open an ATM with a card key or the correct sequence on the keypad. And not all voting machines are made the same, Mike. All of them have tamper tape too. You know, the type that an easy visible inspection will let a pollster know that the machine has been opened without authorization? Kinda like the ones that void the warranty on a TIVO or PC when it is opened?
You can also just take a sledge hammer and pound an electronic voting machine, forcing the pollsters to disqualify that whole machine. So what??????
If you are so convinced that the elections are being stolen, then stay at home in 2008. But unsubstantiated claims that the elections are insecure (and there is no proof, like I have repeated in every posting) is dangerous, and a menace to our democracy.
Alien abductions have no proof either, and Im sure you believe that those happen all the time too. Along with crop circles, which are made by BigFoot. You are suffering from hysterics. Drink a cold glass of water and snap out of it.
BelchSpeak
Nov 08, 2006
Just what percentage of the election do you think was stolen this year? 10 percent? 5 percent?
Let’s entertain your fantasy just for a moment that any group of people were conspiring to alter the election results. How many machines would it take to change an election? In some districts, it may take 15 or 20 machines.
Not only would a person have to be trained to commit your “perfect crime” but he would either have to be allowed to vote multiple times, or he would have to have a trained crew. He would have to recruit such a crew from within the same district, and do so in such a way that there is no evidence of his recruiting techinques.
If he voted multiple times, he would have to perfectly time his wait in line so he would be assigned a different machine every time.
In addition, he would have to have some kind of method to mark tampered machines to prevent his cohorts from hacking the same machine more than once.
And all of this has to be done without breaking the tamper seal or getting caught by the poll watchers and volunteers, which numbered about 10 at the poll I went to.
Wow, this is quite a task. And in order to affect a national election, this crime, which carries a stiff penalty, would have to be perpetrated at multiple voting districts with precise timing.
So you need perfect conditions, and a crew of volunteers that do not care about jail time, complicit or lazy pollsters, a facility to train for this crime without the fear of being noticed or caught, and absolute silence among all participants.
Sorry, Mike. While it could be possible, it is so far into the realm of the unlikely that it is never going to happen. Plus, there is so much risk involved and so many things that could go wrong, that if such a crime had been attempted, the odds are better than even that someone would get caught and we would therefore have proof that it had happened.
Buggy machines? Yes, it happens. Touch pads misaligned? Yes. Confusion about bringing identity cards. Yup. Conspiracy by any group to steal elections by hacking a voting machine.
No. It hasnt happened and it is unlikely due to the complexity and risk involved. The elections are secure.
Chris Fryer
Nov 08, 2006
“Computer scientist Avi Rubin at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, claimed that flaws in touch-screen voting machines built by Diebold Election Systems of McKinney, Texas, meant that a single voter could cast many votes without leaving any evidence of their fraud.” — Reported by New Scientist on 19 October 2006.
Unfortunately this makes it impossible for anyone to say that electoral fraud hasn’t taken place.
There is also the unsettling fact that many machines don’t give you any indication that your vote has been accepted, let alone confirm who you voted for.
Add to this the “misaligned screens” that were reported in The Miami Herald and elsewhere, and you end up with the uncomfortable feeling that the US isn’t equipped to “export democracy” anywhere.
Michael Hampton
Nov 08, 2006
All right, well if you want to live with your head in the sand, deceiving yourself, that’s your business. It doesn’t change anything.
Michael Hampton
Nov 08, 2006
You really only need one person per county with a Diebold setup. And, if you do what the idiots in Shelby County, Tenn., did, maybe even less than that.
Not only did election officials put the central tabulator on the county’s Internet-connected network while it was counting votes, where anybody at any county government workstation could tamper with the count in progress, and anybody on the Internet could have at least viewed it, someone broke into the same central tabulator and attempted to unlawfully alter the election results — then tried (and fortunately failed) to cover it up.
“The sheer number of violations of law and security is horrifying.”
It’s indeed a lot harder, though still easier than you will admit, for an outside party to steal an election, but when they have people on the inside helping, it’s child’s play.
It took me about 30 seconds to find that example, one of many.
Admiral Justin
Nov 08, 2006
Being a wisconsinite, I can say only one thing about the bomber…
“I’m the mad midnight bomber who bombs at midnight.”
Bonus points if you know the source of that
To be honest, however, I’m very surprised how little fighting there has been about the machines.
BelchSpeak
Nov 08, 2006
Black Box Voting and Avi Rubin are the leading opponents of e-voting in the US. Quoting them as “evidence” and experts in this debate does not support your side of the argument.
For BBV, they perpetuated a hoax on US-CERT by submitting unverified claims to vulnerabilities in a voting machine. Prior to the full integration of US-CERT with Carnegie Mellon University’s CERT, (who actually validates vulnerabilities) the fledgling DHS division published a monthly newsletter which listed a voting machine as having a vulnerability. This newsletter was actually published at the time by MITRE corporation as a subscription item for the FBI’s old NIPC program. The author of the newsletter never thought that people would feed them unverified or falsified vulnerability information.
Subsequently, BBV has claimed that it was US-CERT that first announced the vulnerability when it was BBV who was the originator of the information. This gave them a false authority behind their claim.
Both Avi and BBV are exploiting fears of evoting to push their books.
If you want to prove voter machine fraud to me, show me a single instance where evoting fraud claims have led to an indictment.
Ryan
Nov 08, 2006
When people argue over electronic voting machines, there is one thing that people don’t talk about. That is that electronic voting machines are beneficial for the disabled. For the first time, blind people got to vote privately. Before this year, we had to have somebody help us fill out the ballots. How would you feel if the only way to vote was to have to tell somebody who you want to vote for and what amendments you want to vote yes or no on? My guess is, that if you were blind, you wouldn’t think that was fair and you would fight tooth and nail to be able to vote independantly. If you can tell me another way that blind people could vote independantly without electronic voting machines, I’m open to suggestions.
Alex
Nov 08, 2006
BelchSpeak here is a true believer. He’d rather be sorry than safe.
The election that was undeniably flipped was 2000; the fraud evidence from 2002, 2004, and 2006 is nowhere as conclusive. The neo-cons already set things in motion: the American people were so brainwashed by 9/11 that they didn’t have to cheat, and they probably didn’t, at least not on a large scale. The backdoors are in place, however, as the evidence shows, and the Washington establishment need not worry about electoral opinion ever getting seriously in the way of their plans.
The two halves of the Republicrat party like to alternate every few terms. The right fist is almost done punching the face of the American people for now. Soon it will be the left fist’s turn. Maybe in the 2008, 2010, or 2012 elections, Mr. Belch will see a repeat of the 1960 fraud, giving socialist Dems complete power in Washington. He’ll be angry then, but it will be too late.
Ya gotta kill snakes before they hatch.
BelchSpeak
Nov 08, 2006
“the burden of proof would be on the government to demonstrate that the election methods are verifiably fair.”
Why has this burden of proof never been discussed prior to the introduction of electronic machines? And as a reminder, it is not the federal government, but the local government that is in charge of operating the electoral process. As said above, if you have a problem with the way things are run, go to city council and petition for a change.
And the whole paper trail argument is a canard anyways. Why have one? If the vote could be hacked, couldnt the paper trail be hacked? The addition of printer apparatus would only slow the process and leave more room for confusion and longer lines at the polls.
And no, errors and allegations have never prompted a “re-vote” that I have been able to find.
Alex
Nov 08, 2006
In a genuinely free society, if there’s still a need for public elections, the burden of proof would be on the government to demonstrate that the election methods are verifiably fair.
We are nowhere close… No tally counts of votes for comparison checks, and no receipts – in network protocols, this is called “send and pray”! Horrendous conflicts of interest among people executing the electoral process! Layers upon layers of bureaucracy to prevent recounts! Statistically impossible and historically unique discrepancies with exit polls! Hell, ballots found in trash cans!
Any one of those things by itself should require a stern investigation and a complete re-vote in all affected precincts.
Tom K.
Nov 09, 2006
“Why has this burden of proof never been discussed prior to the introduction of electronic machines? And as a reminder, it is not the federal government, but the local government that is in charge of operating the electoral process.”
To answer your question in light of the following statement: Because for the first time, the ballots themselves are cast into a medium that is effectively a “black box” that the local election officials aren’t aware of the contents of.
Does the black box count the votes accurately, or does the black box flip every 20th Candidate X vote into a vote for Candidate Y? No way to tell unless we get rid of the black box. In this fundamental way, election results with (black box) E-voting machines is no longer strictly within the purview of local governments.
Give me election machines running on locally provided computers using a fully open source voting software. That removes the obscurity of the black box.
Valdis Kletnieks
Nov 09, 2006
We have a winner for Fortuitous Typo of the Month!
Michael Hampton
Nov 09, 2006
I actually caught the typo prior to publication and decided to leave it in anyway.
And congratulations, you’re our first IPv6 commenter!
C Brannon
Nov 09, 2006
Come on folks, Belchspeak is having more than is far share of speech here. He moans about how biased reporters of voting machine fraud are, without revealing unambiguously his own biases. As far as I know, he’s a shill for Diebold, et. al. Give him no credibility.
tjana stasni
Nov 09, 2006
the american electoral system is a joke. the united nations should observe all future elections until the government is restructured in democratic fashion. that the rich christians can dominate the country and use it’s military to open and maintain markets in third world countries is an abomination. i wish god existed. he would kick some ass!
Michael Hampton
Nov 09, 2006
Huh? As bad as things are here already, you want them to get worse?
Crapulax
Nov 10, 2006
I can understand your concerns about electronic voting machines, about wether or not all the ballots are counted fairly, about intimidation, about the odd ridiculous situation that occurs, but let me just give you an outside point of view. You guys are close to 300 million now. Suppose (worst case scenarion) a 1% chance of anomaly, no matter the type of anomaly – that would yield 300 000 oddities. Even with a 0,1% chance of anomaly, that’s still 30 000 events, which is actually a small enough percentage and overall, is a reliable election. But it’s certainly a large enough number to attract media attention, especially since you always hear about what goes wrong, not about what goes right. So before you complain about unreliable elections, you must first look at the actual number of voters and the actual percentage of anomalies… which I unfortunately doubt would be published in the USA. So what it all boils down to, is wether or not you have faith in the overall election system. If you don’t, any election becomes meaningless anyway, regardless of the number of mistakes made. If you do have faith, then you have to accept that no system is ever perfect and you’re bound to have a number of mistakes (voting machines can be manipulated but so can election workers); just try to learn from them and keep them as low as possible.
I would love to compare your average number of anomalies per election with ours, in Canada. We have just around 12% of your population so we’re bound to have a lower number of mistakes than you would, but I’m sure our actual percentages of anomalies in relation to the number of votes would be similar to yours. I think that’s a more revealing statistic…
But there are two issues that few people seem to discuss in the US – voter eligibilty and voter turnout. You are the self-labeled largest democracy in the world… yet a 50% voter turnout is good in the USA. For us, if we go below 70% the media calls it a disaster. And how many people are denied their right to vote because of misdemeanor charges ? Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the right to vote determined by state laws instead of federal laws ? This would lead to voter rights that are not uniform across the land. Remember Florida in the 2000 presidential elections ?
So the ultimate question is wether or not democracy means anything if a large part of the population either does not bother to vote or cannot vote for reasons that may be debatable. I’d question these points much more than the actual voting procedure.
Dana Hanley
Nov 17, 2006
Admiral, I believe it is, “I am the mad midnight bomber what bombs at midnight,” not “who.”
a bit OT, I think, but I’ll take up any challenges on the old Tick cartoon series : )
Spoon!
Catelyn
Nov 24, 2006
If you wonder at all about the validity of accusations of miscalculations of votes, watch the HBO Documentary Hacking Democracy . It’s scary how easy it is for the data to be altered, hacked, or otherwise manipulated. Everyone’s vote is supposed to count, but in some cases this election it didn’t count or was counted for the wrong person.