Wednesday June 11, 2008

An illustrated demonstration of the new optical voting machines and accompanying article. It’s like taking a test in college, with multiple-choice bubbles you fill in with a #2 pencil. But so then why do the scanners need to be at the polling stations? Why not a big fast scanner at election headquarters?

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  1. Matthew I. Pinzur    Wed Jun 11, 09:41 AM #  

    They want scanners at each polling place because it gives the voter a chance to fix a ballot that is either blank or has too many votes in a race (i.e. an “overvote”).

    Also, we’re in the process of fixing a typo in that online graphic… at this hour, it says voters “will now receive a receipt” after they vote. That should read (as it does in the print version) that voters “will not receive a receipt.”

    One letter, a world of difference. You will NOT get a receipt. By state law, the machine can’t print anything that indicates who a voter picked… at most, it could produce a receipt that simply confirmed that you voted. They decided not to do that in either Broward or Miami-Dade.



  2. Michael Calderin    Wed Jun 11, 11:07 AM #  

    A note that you voted doesn’t do anybody any good. Something like that wouldn’t be useful for recount purposes. It’s as useful as the “I Voted” stickers we get.

    The scanners in the precincts will actually be a big help. People will be given up to three tries to submit a ballot without over- or under-votes, including marks that don’t make sense or aren’t large enough to register.

    It’s not perfect, and the change could be confusing to some people, but it does have some notable advantages to the touchscreen machines we’ve used the past few years.



  3. Biscayne Bystander    Thu Jun 12, 06:36 AM #  

    Click on the link to my name.



  4. Miguel Marcos    Thu Jun 12, 08:04 AM #  

    Too many questions are raised because the system is just not straightforward.

    > A note that you voted doesn’t do anybody
    > any good. Something like that wouldn’t
    > be useful for recount purposes. It’s as
    > useful as the “I Voted” stickers we get.

    Sure it does. It doesn’t have to display any detail about the person who voted or the votes themselves as you can generate a bar code or similar feature on the fly and print it out.

    What happens to the paper ballot? Is it swallowed and kept by the machine? If so, is it kept for auditing purposes? If it’s not swallowed, why not print a bar code on it and let the voter keep it as proof of their vote?

    I find the USB flash drive thing as the only data source dismaying. Firstly, I hope there is more than one drive and that they are mirroring the drive data onto separate drives in case one fails. What’s the capacity of these drives, what kind of data do they save and in what format…

    There is no reason why they can’t transmit the data to a data center at the same time as it is stored locally in the USB drives. This way they could easily audit machines electronically at random for local or network failures as they could check locally stored data against network stored data. Plus having the data at the network center means preliminary results are available earlier with subsequent double checking against the locally stored drive data.

    ES&S is behind these machines. Are they giving government officials access to the hardware and code behind these machines so they can be independently audited? Why are these machines coming out just a few months before the general elections?

    The Herald article quotes “It will not, however, alert a voter who skipped one or more races. That would likely create a bottleneck at the machine because so many voters skip low-profile elections.” Pardon me? A simple question asking the voter if skipped races is intentional on the voter’s part is a bottleneck? (Yes, I know in the old paper ballot days, there was no notification. This is electronic now, though, and it’s silly to presume it could be a bottleneck? When you make a transfer at an ATM at your bank, you get a chance to confirm what you’re doing. If the bank can do it, the government voting machine can.)

    It boggles the mind how such a simple civil action of such huge importance is turned into a nightmare technology project across the nation.



  5. Biscayne Bystander    Fri Jun 13, 07:02 AM <a href="http://criticalmiami.com/2008/06/11/new-optical-voting-m