Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org
According to today’s Island Packet voters on Hilton Head Island (Beaufort County), South Carolina discovered that some races were missing on the final review screen of the ES&S iVotronic touch-screen voting machines, at the end of the voting process, after voters completed their selections…
But when she reviewed her selections before actually casting the ballot, she noticed that her two picks for the Bluffton Town Council did not register. Her husband had the same problem.
With the assistance of a Hilton Head employee, the two attempted to re-cast their ballots. Again, it didn’t work.
They resolved the problem by casting paper ballots for the council race, Nancy Roe said.
“I’m real political, so I checked the ballot,” she said. “If I had only given it a quick glance and punched ‘vote,’ I never would’ve known.”
During the South Carolina primary, as The BRAD BLOG reported at the time, ES&S iVotronics in at least one county failed to work at all, leading to voters scrambling to cast votes on scraps of paper, and even paper towels! Here we have another instance of South Carolina election officials failing to do required pre-election testing. These instances should never happen but they are happening all too often in this state that relies heavily on their failed voting system vendor.
Last week, the same ES&S iVotronic touch-screens were reported to have been flipping votes in two WV counties, and yesterday, in one TN county. We’ll have another report, on votes flipping on ES&S iVotronics in yet another TN county today shortly. [Update: That story now here…]
In August of 2007 — in time to actually do something about it — HDNet ran a scathing investigative exposé (video here) on the very same ES&S iVotronics, the terrible quality-control practices in use at their sweatshop in The Philippines and the tendency of the machines to break down and flip votes. The report was almost entirely ignored by the entirety of the rest of the media.
It’s time to get these machines the hell out of service.
UPDATE: 10/23/08, 12:25pm PT: South Carolina’s Island Packet says the problem is now “resolved”. But it isn’t. The paper explains this way:
Obama, for example — and that candidate’s name appears on the final review screen.
However, in the races for Bluffton Town and Beaufort City councils, voters can choose up to two candidates. In those cases, the machine shows voters only that they’ve picked the correct number of candidates
without showing the candidates’ names, according to Eric Montgomery, a county election equipment specialist.
So on the ES&S iVotronic the review screen does not show the names of the voters selections when the race is a “choose two” or more. It only tells the voter that they chose two candidates (for instance).
The Help American Vote Act of 2002, however, requires that the voter be able to review and verify their selections. Not a number, but their selections:
(a) Requirements.–Each voting system used in an election for Federal office shall meet the following requirements:
(1) In general.–
(A) Except as provided in subparagraph (B), the voting system (including any lever voting system, optical scanning voting system, or direct recording electronic system) shall–
(i) permit the voter to verify (in a private and independent manner) the votes selected by the voter on the ballot before the ballot is cast and counted;
(ii) provide the voter with the opportunity (in a private and independent manner) to change the ballot or correct any error before the ballot is cast and counted (including the opportunity to correct the error through the issuance of a replacement ballot if the voter was otherwise unable to change the ballot or correct any error);
Enough testing.
Testing is a failure, machines are a failure, electronic voting machine companies are a failure. Blaming it on human error, or any other myriad of bullshit is unacceptable. It’s time the manufacture and the contractors are held accountable, and it’s time the votes were counted. Not after this meltdown and another President is picked, that’s too late.
RIGHT NOW BEFORE THE ELECTION!
Destructively Reverse engineer, all failed electronic vote tabulation devices. Force the corporations to hand over ALL software. What ever is left of the parts should be donated to colleges for study, or recycled for cash to pay for the national debit these machines have caused.
No more electronic vote registration devices.
PAPER ONLY, PUBLIC OVERSIGHT ONLY, UNBROKEN CHAIN OF CUSTODY ONLY. if at any point any of these things are broken, then nullify and hold a new election.
NO ELECTRONICS IN ELECTIONS!
NO NETWORKS IN ELECTIONS!
hand count, hand deliver face to face, in daylight!
Sue the manufactures, and hold a new election on paper with public oversight, and unbroken chain of custody.
Discredit and remove from ever doing business, contracting, or holding office or security clearance, or lobbying of all PRO MACHINE people, public figures, ceo’s. Clean our their bank accounts, clean out their corporations,
File a complaint in the public file of your local station for not covering this. File a complaint to the FCC.
NO more voter ID crap, you already proved your damn identity when you registered to vote.
This shit has got to stop. It’s already destroyed the country.
We need paper ballots. You can count them electronically, so long as a random sample are audited by hand.
The list of electronic voting problems is long and growing: Conway, Arkansas (votes recorded for a candidate and race that were not on the ballot), Bush-Gore 2000 in FL (NEGATIVE 16,022 ballots for Gore), Sarasota, FL 2006 (13% undervotes on the machines, only 2% undervotes on paper), Ohio votes counted in Tennessee on a server running GOP software 2004 (an invitation to Man-in-the Middle fraud), ERNEST report to the Ohio Sec. of State that slams all the electronic voting machines used in Ohio, etc.
For the sake of Democracy, get rid of the electronic voting machines — especially the DREs. They are an invitation to fraud!
I was with you until I heard
Eleanor Hare say
WRONG.
Public oversight can not be provided on electronic signals. Parts can burn up. Paper can be the wrong size, the print can be mis-aligned, and when an anomaly (Cough FAILURE) rears it’s ugly head, it’s too late.
This random sample audit nonsense, hasn’t worked. It doesn’t protect 100% of the vote. By definition it’s a SAMPLE or (Cough) FRACTION!
ALL Electronic vote tabulation devices have NO PLACE IN ELECTIONS, their signals can not be validated.
THE PUBLIC CAN NOT PROVIDE OVERSIGHT OF ELECTRONIC SIGNALS.
Make a nice pot of coffee, (Or even drink a bottle of whiskey, that’s the way I like my non-linear simultaneous equations) go back and read your Grobb, Malvino and Floyd.
Then use your critical thinking skills.
Ask yourself why the sheet metal covers are off of the district optical scanners with tech’s swarming underneath scratching their heads on Election night?
The Sample will NOT take care of that!
Instead the media will roll on the existing numbers.
An Optical scanner might be good for being lazy in transcribing a paper, but NOT FOR OUR ELECTIONS. By the way ever notice how you still have to manually correct the results of an OCR document?
An election is not a “RANDOM SAMPLE.”
With that logic we should “randomly sample” who get’s to cast a ballot in the first place.
The only reason we have optical scanners is so that a CORPORATION can put a $40 piece of crap scanner in a giant box, feed it a couple phases of electrical power and charge $6,000-$15,000 for it.
Just expensive enough to be a felony to smash it!
Random Sample.. Blagh.. More like the destruction of the United States by a fascist foothold.
First off, if this is the League of Women Voters/Computer Science professor Eleanor Hare, greetings from a former student.
The ideal solution would be paper ballots counted by hand with NO machines involved — but that probably won’t happen. There needs to be at least SOME sort of paper involved — something has to be there to be recounted.
My system would call for not a RANDOM sample, but a SELECTED one. It works like this:
Each party or candidate selects a number of precincts to be fully hand-counted. (It is assumed that they would select precincts with reported problems.) If there is a difference between the hand count and the machine count, the percentage error is recorded. If a candidate “wins” an election by less than the greatest recorded percentage error, then ALL the ballots have to be recounted by hand.
It’s a matter of feedback — if a vote flipper knows that his work will be detected, he will be less likely to try.