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Why do Americans use voting machines exactly? I mean, it just prints out their choice at the end right? What benefit do they actually gain from having pressed b

Why do Americans use voting machines exactly? I mean, it just prints out their choice at the end right? What benefit do they actually gain from having pressed buttons instead of using a pen? It just seems to fuel the hacking conspiracy every time a president is elected. In the UK we turn up, go into the booth with the paper slip, and tick our choice with a pen. Then we fold it and post it into a container which later gets shipped off to the counting room. I just can't understand why you guys have to physically turn up if you are just going to select your answer on a computer anyway.

DanBC 10y ago
The UK system wouldn't stop conspiracy theorists because it's not strictly anonymous. https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-1051,00.html https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-1051,0...
- tehwalrus 10y ago
  Thanks for posting this, really interesting/terrifying and I hadn't seen it before.
an_account 10y ago
Every state in America (and even different counties within states) vote differently. I voted on paper and it was put in a box to be counted in a central location. This takes forever and they just now are finishing up counting. Electronic voting is a lot quicker and cheaper to count. I'd argue that the best system is one in which you vote on paper but it's counted electronically at the polling booth. That way there's a paper trail that can be audited and also quick counting.
- Procrastes 10y ago
  That does sound better, and I left out the rapid counting. Good point.
- sopooneo 10y ago
  But why not scan-tron? It seems like that is the best of both worlds. Start with a simple physical paper that everyone can understand and audit as the primary record, but then have each voter feed their own directly into a scan machine that can tally and send counts in quickly? That's how we do it around me, and it seems like a strictly superior approach. What am I missing?
  - ecnahc515 10y ago
    The scantron machines are expensive and it's not really feasible to have at every polling location. Lots of polling locations are at churches a d such anyways. Additionally, scantrons can be fairly slow depending on the machine.
    - mjcl 10y ago
      They do in some counties. I'm a pollworker in Alameda County and every precinct uses an optical scanner (made by Sequoia). At the end of the night the memory pack is removed and taken back to a return center to be counted. The paper ballots are boxed and sealed in case there are any problems with the electronic tally. Speed-wise, it only takes the machine about 1 second per ballot card.
    - makeapoint 10y ago
      Just to be clear, you are arguing that that scantron machines are expensive and not feasible at every polling location so instead we should provide dozens of more expensive electronic voting machines at each polling location?
  - EvilTerran 10y ago
    Scantrons are a big improvement over electronic-only counting, but they can struggle with imperfectly-filled-in ballots... another good alternative, which avoids that particular problem, is to have a machine where you make your selections by button-press - but it prints them onto a physical card, lets you verify the printout through a window, then drops it into a built-in ballotbox. The machine itself can keep count, or the cards could be designed for scantron-esque machine counting - regardless, in case of a disputed result, the cards can be counted the traditional way (by hand, with observers from each party present, etc). Not my idea, BTW, but I don't recall where I read it - nor whether it was a description of something actually in use or merely a proposal.
- ianai 10y ago
  That's how it worked where I voted. We made our selections on a touch screen and it printed a ballot for us to check.
- tehwalrus 10y ago
  In the UK we use paper ballots and manage the count overnight after the election (some seats come back the day after, but the overall parliamentary majority is usually clear by then.) Our population is only 1/6th yours, IIRC, and you subdivide more heavily into states already.
Procrastes 10y ago
Hi Hacker_9. In Texas, where I vote, the machines don't even print paper. We just have to trust that the machine correctly recorded our vote. The reasons for the machines are, 1. cost cutting over manual counts, 2. profiteering by well connected companies, 3. And potentially making sure only the "right" votes count, although that part isn't proven. In California we were able to vote at home with a mail-in, paper ballot and I much prefer that.
- erichocean 10y ago
  > In California we were able to vote at home with a mail-in, paper ballot and I much prefer that. I guess you trust the mail service and the people on the receiving end to properly record your vote. I prefer the day of (also in CA), where you get to put it into the counting machine yourself—at least then I know it was counted at my polling place.
  - sgk284 10y ago
    When you do mail-in voting, your ballot has a tab you pull off with a number on it. You can check on a government website whether or not your ballot was counted using this number (though it won't show how you voted).
  - RandomInteger4 10y ago
    "At least then I know that I put it in a machine physically, which gave me psychological comfort, but no actual verification that my vote was counted." ^-- Fixed that for you. But seriously, at some point, unless everyone sticks around to watch everyone else's votes being counted, there has to be some level of trust with the system. The only thing we can do better is to make vote counting machines' code open sourced and have the code signed with a trusted Public Key Infrastructure of some sort.
    - saint_fiasco 10y ago
      In my country some people stick around in the voting place to watch how the votes are counted. As long as somebody from your preferred political party stays, you don't have to stick around. The paper system is very open source already. So open that even non-developers can understand it.
rhino369 10y ago
You are still using a voting machine, but you've just introduced a shitty paper input that needs to be scanned into the machine. The counting machine is a voting machine. It can be hacked. The only benefit is that you have a paper record that can be corroborated if there is evidence of hacking later. But we could do a printout paper record on voting machines too. You'd be surprised how many of those paper ballots don't get recognized when they are counted. Because the checkmarks don't fill up the box enough or because of optical/scantron error.
- RCortex 10y ago
  Please post a source or more of an explanation before spreading FUD like this...
- robryan 10y ago
  Sure that happens to a small portion, if the result is close enough though you can go back over them by hand. The difference is that the voting machine makes it possible to hack the paper trail.
- Symbiote 10y ago
  Ballots are counted by hand in the UK. There are pictures and a description here: http://www.bbc.com/news/election-2015-england-32533064 http://www.bbc.com/news/election-2015-england-32533064
  - rhino369 10y ago
    Yikes that is even worse. Hand counts have been shown to be off by 1-2%.
- hacker_9 10y ago
  Actually in the UK votes are counted manually by people in big halls under watch by accredited observers. No voting machine in the process at all.
- dghf 10y ago
  > You'd be surprised how many of those paper ballots don't get recognized when they are counted. Because the checkmarks don't fill up the box enough or because of optical/scantron error. In the UK's 2014 elections for the European Parliament, a Scottish voter wrote against the four parties/candidates listed: "wank"; "wank"; "good guy"; "wank". The vote was deemed valid as the voter had expressed a clear preference. (Source: https://twitter.com/JamieRoss7/status/473068708441894912/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/JamieRoss7/status/473068708441894912/pho...)
neffy 10y ago
There's a bunch of reasons, probably starting with the voting there being so much more complicated - there are a lot more positions being elected than in the UK. It's hard to say if the machines are really cheaper, but there seems to also be a lack of willingness to adequately fund the process, judging by the queues in many places. Which is a shame, because it's a fairly effective way to push money back into the economy, at least when a manual system is used.
Zombieball 10y ago
A former co-worker of mine wrote software for voting machines in Brazil. He described to me a few reasons why electronic voting machines are important. To be honest I forget the majority, but one story that stuck with me: One common scheme electronic voting machines help prevent is forced votes. A bad guy gets their hand on a single empty ballot and writes the name of the candidate he wants to win on it. He then comes to you and threatens you and your family. Says hand in this pre-filled ballot and bring me back your empty ballot, or else... You comply, he fills out the empty ballot again, and repeats. The electronic voting machines protect your identity. They allow you to vote anonymously. They provide data integrity that is harder to spoof than paper voting methods. I explicitly asked why they don't just vote on paper ballots like they do in Canada (or the UK as you describe). His response was that we take for granted the inherit trust our societies have to allow us to vote in such a fashion without it being tampered.
- samastur 10y ago
  Color me unsurprised that a person who wrote software for voting machines also finds them useful. The problem I have with this particular scenario is that it imagines a reality in which someone can afford to collect votes one by one with impunity but can't force these same bunch of people (and one or two simply aren't enough to matter) at the voting station itself.
  - NumberCruncher 10y ago
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_FNsuyX8lNo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_FNsuyX8lNo
- extra88 10y ago
  Voter coercion is something to be concerned about but the scenario you describe won't keep me up at night. The number one problem is it's hard to scale up to a level that would actually sway an election. It only takes one hero to call the police while they're at the polling station or after their family is released and the sequence is broken. There's no need for the victim to actually submit the pre-filled ballot, they can throw it out or do something to it to make it invalid then come back with the blank one. The ballots where I vote are on a heavier stock paper that are not trivial to conceal bringing in and taking out; most could do it but one victim slips up and the scheme could fail. Where I vote, my paper ballot in no way identifies me. I identify myself upon entering the polling station, they find my name on the list of registered voters and mark it. When I'm turning in my completed ballot, I again identify myself and my name is marked on a separate list. So there's a record that I voted but not for whom I voted. How would an electronic voting machine improve upon this? BTW, where I vote, the paper ballots are the bubble scan kind and the voter feeds it to the machine themselves. This provides very fast tabulations with a paper record for security and recounts.
Aldo_MX 10y ago
This reminds me about the Russian pencil hoax.
danjoc 10y ago
>Why do Americans use voting machines exactly? It was a knee jerk reaction by Congress to the 2000 presidential election recounts in Florida. They passed a bill that funded the purchase of new voting machines called the Help America Vote Act[1]. It provided a fat pile of federal funds to states for the purpose of replacing voting equipment. Of course, throw a mountain of money in front of federal contractors, and several will rush out poorly designed systems quickly to claim the prize. Secure voting was the last thing on their minds. Diebold actually sued the state of Massachusetts for "wrongful purchase" of competitor systems.[2] Slashdot covered the fiasco generated by HAVA for years. Just search for Diebold or Sequoia in relation to their domain.[3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help_America_Vote_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help_America_Vote_Act [2] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/07/03/26/1431258/diebold-sues-massachusetts-for-wrongful-purchase https://yro.slashdot.org/story/07/03/26/1431258/diebold-sues... [3] https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=diebold%20site%3Aslashdot.org https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=diebold%20site%3Aslashdot.org
rtkwe 10y ago
So there's a couple thing to unravel here. First, each county in the US runs their elections separately so within a single state you might see a couple different systems. Some places like my area in North Carolina use a system like what you describe except the ballots are scanned through an optical scanner then stored in case there's the need to do a recount. There's no central board above the county level that the ballots would be sent to for counting. Second electronic machines are popular because they speed the election counting and are cheaper to run because the election board doesn't have to print tens to hundreds of thousands of ballots. A good electronic voting machine reports the vote 2 ways digitally to some vote tabulator local to that voting place and with a paper record that can be audited. The paper print out their having printed in this video is the end of the night tally that'll be reported to the county/state board of elections to be combined with the rest of the results. Third doing it on a centrally located machine instead of over the internet adds a lot of security to the process. Trying to properly secure single purpose hardware like a voting machine that can be kept in a monitored location is a much simpler task than trying to find a way to ensure the Joe/Jane Voter's computer isn't compromised when sending the data to their counties board of elections. Not to mention that by accepting votes over the internet you're opening yourself up to everyone being able to remotely attempt to exploit the system. At least with a voting machine only connected to other election hardware attacks are limited to someone that's physically at the voting location. It's also tricky to prevent double voting while maintaining complete anonymity.

DanBC 10y ago

The UK system wouldn't stop conspiracy theorists because it's not strictly anonymous. https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-1051,00.html https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-1051,0...

tehwalrus 10y ago
Thanks for posting this, really interesting/terrifying and I hadn't seen it before.

an_account 10y ago

Every state in America (and even different counties within states) vote differently. I voted on paper and it was put in a box to be counted in a central location. This takes forever and they just now are finishing up counting. Electronic voting is a lot quicker and cheaper to count. I'd argue that the best system is one in which you vote on paper but it's counted electronically at the polling booth. That way there's a paper trail that can be audited and also quick counting.

Procrastes 10y ago
That does sound better, and I left out the rapid counting. Good point.
sopooneo 10y ago
But why not scan-tron? It seems like that is the best of both worlds. Start with a simple physical paper that everyone can understand and audit as the primary record, but then have each voter feed their own directly into a scan machine that can tally and send counts in quickly? That's how we do it around me, and it seems like a strictly superior approach. What am I missing?
- ecnahc515 10y ago
  The scantron machines are expensive and it's not really feasible to have at every polling location. Lots of polling locations are at churches a d such anyways. Additionally, scantrons can be fairly slow depending on the machine.
  - mjcl 10y ago
    They do in some counties. I'm a pollworker in Alameda County and every precinct uses an optical scanner (made by Sequoia). At the end of the night the memory pack is removed and taken back to a return center to be counted. The paper ballots are boxed and sealed in case there are any problems with the electronic tally. Speed-wise, it only takes the machine about 1 second per ballot card.
  - makeapoint 10y ago
    Just to be clear, you are arguing that that scantron machines are expensive and not feasible at every polling location so instead we should provide dozens of more expensive electronic voting machines at each polling location?
- EvilTerran 10y ago
  Scantrons are a big improvement over electronic-only counting, but they can struggle with imperfectly-filled-in ballots... another good alternative, which avoids that particular problem, is to have a machine where you make your selections by button-press - but it prints them onto a physical card, lets you verify the printout through a window, then drops it into a built-in ballotbox. The machine itself can keep count, or the cards could be designed for scantron-esque machine counting - regardless, in case of a disputed result, the cards can be counted the traditional way (by hand, with observers from each party present, etc). Not my idea, BTW, but I don't recall where I read it - nor whether it was a description of something actually in use or merely a proposal.
ianai 10y ago
That's how it worked where I voted. We made our selections on a touch screen and it printed a ballot for us to check.
tehwalrus 10y ago
In the UK we use paper ballots and manage the count overnight after the election (some seats come back the day after, but the overall parliamentary majority is usually clear by then.) Our population is only 1/6th yours, IIRC, and you subdivide more heavily into states already.

Procrastes 10y ago

Hi Hacker_9. In Texas, where I vote, the machines don't even print paper. We just have to trust that the machine correctly recorded our vote. The reasons for the machines are, 1. cost cutting over manual counts, 2. profiteering by well connected companies, 3. And potentially making sure only the "right" votes count, although that part isn't proven. In California we were able to vote at home with a mail-in, paper ballot and I much prefer that.

erichocean 10y ago
> In California we were able to vote at home with a mail-in, paper ballot and I much prefer that. I guess you trust the mail service and the people on the receiving end to properly record your vote. I prefer the day of (also in CA), where you get to put it into the counting machine yourself—at least then I know it was counted at my polling place.
- sgk284 10y ago
  When you do mail-in voting, your ballot has a tab you pull off with a number on it. You can check on a government website whether or not your ballot was counted using this number (though it won't show how you voted).
- RandomInteger4 10y ago
  "At least then I know that I put it in a machine physically, which gave me psychological comfort, but no actual verification that my vote was counted." ^-- Fixed that for you. But seriously, at some point, unless everyone sticks around to watch everyone else's votes being counted, there has to be some level of trust with the system. The only thing we can do better is to make vote counting machines' code open sourced and have the code signed with a trusted Public Key Infrastructure of some sort.
  - saint_fiasco 10y ago
    In my country some people stick around in the voting place to watch how the votes are counted. As long as somebody from your preferred political party stays, you don't have to stick around. The paper system is very open source already. So open that even non-developers can understand it.

rhino369 10y ago

You are still using a voting machine, but you've just introduced a shitty paper input that needs to be scanned into the machine. The counting machine is a voting machine. It can be hacked. The only benefit is that you have a paper record that can be corroborated if there is evidence of hacking later. But we could do a printout paper record on voting machines too. You'd be surprised how many of those paper ballots don't get recognized when they are counted. Because the checkmarks don't fill up the box enough or because of optical/scantron error.

RCortex 10y ago
Please post a source or more of an explanation before spreading FUD like this...
robryan 10y ago
Sure that happens to a small portion, if the result is close enough though you can go back over them by hand. The difference is that the voting machine makes it possible to hack the paper trail.
Symbiote 10y ago
Ballots are counted by hand in the UK. There are pictures and a description here: http://www.bbc.com/news/election-2015-england-32533064 http://www.bbc.com/news/election-2015-england-32533064
- rhino369 10y ago
  Yikes that is even worse. Hand counts have been shown to be off by 1-2%.
hacker_9 10y ago
Actually in the UK votes are counted manually by people in big halls under watch by accredited observers. No voting machine in the process at all.
dghf 10y ago
> You'd be surprised how many of those paper ballots don't get recognized when they are counted. Because the checkmarks don't fill up the box enough or because of optical/scantron error. In the UK's 2014 elections for the European Parliament, a Scottish voter wrote against the four parties/candidates listed: "wank"; "wank"; "good guy"; "wank". The vote was deemed valid as the voter had expressed a clear preference. (Source: https://twitter.com/JamieRoss7/status/473068708441894912/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/JamieRoss7/status/473068708441894912/pho...)

neffy 10y ago

There's a bunch of reasons, probably starting with the voting there being so much more complicated - there are a lot more positions being elected than in the UK. It's hard to say if the machines are really cheaper, but there seems to also be a lack of willingness to adequately fund the process, judging by the queues in many places. Which is a shame, because it's a fairly effective way to push money back into the economy, at least when a manual system is used.

Zombieball 10y ago

A former co-worker of mine wrote software for voting machines in Brazil. He described to me a few reasons why electronic voting machines are important. To be honest I forget the majority, but one story that stuck with me: One common scheme electronic voting machines help prevent is forced votes. A bad guy gets their hand on a single empty ballot and writes the name of the candidate he wants to win on it. He then comes to you and threatens you and your family. Says hand in this pre-filled ballot and bring me back your empty ballot, or else... You comply, he fills out the empty ballot again, and repeats. The electronic voting machines protect your identity. They allow you to vote anonymously. They provide data integrity that is harder to spoof than paper voting methods. I explicitly asked why they don't just vote on paper ballots like they do in Canada (or the UK as you describe). His response was that we take for granted the inherit trust our societies have to allow us to vote in such a fashion without it being tampered.

samastur 10y ago
Color me unsurprised that a person who wrote software for voting machines also finds them useful. The problem I have with this particular scenario is that it imagines a reality in which someone can afford to collect votes one by one with impunity but can't force these same bunch of people (and one or two simply aren't enough to matter) at the voting station itself.
- NumberCruncher 10y ago
  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_FNsuyX8lNo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_FNsuyX8lNo
extra88 10y ago
Voter coercion is something to be concerned about but the scenario you describe won't keep me up at night. The number one problem is it's hard to scale up to a level that would actually sway an election. It only takes one hero to call the police while they're at the polling station or after their family is released and the sequence is broken. There's no need for the victim to actually submit the pre-filled ballot, they can throw it out or do something to it to make it invalid then come back with the blank one. The ballots where I vote are on a heavier stock paper that are not trivial to conceal bringing in and taking out; most could do it but one victim slips up and the scheme could fail. Where I vote, my paper ballot in no way identifies me. I identify myself upon entering the polling station, they find my name on the list of registered voters and mark it. When I'm turning in my completed ballot, I again identify myself and my name is marked on a separate list. So there's a record that I voted but not for whom I voted. How would an electronic voting machine improve upon this? BTW, where I vote, the paper ballots are the bubble scan kind and the voter feeds it to the machine themselves. This provides very fast tabulations with a paper record for security and recounts.

Aldo_MX 10y ago

This reminds me about the Russian pencil hoax.

danjoc 10y ago

>Why do Americans use voting machines exactly? It was a knee jerk reaction by Congress to the 2000 presidential election recounts in Florida. They passed a bill that funded the purchase of new voting machines called the Help America Vote Act[1]. It provided a fat pile of federal funds to states for the purpose of replacing voting equipment. Of course, throw a mountain of money in front of federal contractors, and several will rush out poorly designed systems quickly to claim the prize. Secure voting was the last thing on their minds. Diebold actually sued the state of Massachusetts for "wrongful purchase" of competitor systems.[2] Slashdot covered the fiasco generated by HAVA for years. Just search for Diebold or Sequoia in relation to their domain.[3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help_America_Vote_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help_America_Vote_Act [2] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/07/03/26/1431258/diebold-sues-massachusetts-for-wrongful-purchase https://yro.slashdot.org/story/07/03/26/1431258/diebold-sues... [3] https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=diebold%20site%3Aslashdot.org https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=diebold%20site%3Aslashdot.org

rtkwe 10y ago

So there's a couple thing to unravel here. First, each county in the US runs their elections separately so within a single state you might see a couple different systems. Some places like my area in North Carolina use a system like what you describe except the ballots are scanned through an optical scanner then stored in case there's the need to do a recount. There's no central board above the county level that the ballots would be sent to for counting. Second electronic machines are popular because they speed the election counting and are cheaper to run because the election board doesn't have to print tens to hundreds of thousands of ballots. A good electronic voting machine reports the vote 2 ways digitally to some vote tabulator local to that voting place and with a paper record that can be audited. The paper print out their having printed in this video is the end of the night tally that'll be reported to the county/state board of elections to be combined with the rest of the results. Third doing it on a centrally located machine instead of over the internet adds a lot of security to the process. Trying to properly secure single purpose hardware like a voting machine that can be kept in a monitored location is a much simpler task than trying to find a way to ensure the Joe/Jane Voter's computer isn't compromised when sending the data to their counties board of elections. Not to mention that by accepting votes over the internet you're opening yourself up to everyone being able to remotely attempt to exploit the system. At least with a voting machine only connected to other election hardware attacks are limited to someone that's physically at the voting location. It's also tricky to prevent double voting while maintaining complete anonymity.