13 ms·

Texans say voting machines changing straight-ticket choices

266 points by threatofrain 8y ago

clircle 8y ago
I do and will always advise my friends and family to vote by mail in ballot (if allowed).
- craftyguy 8y ago
  In Oregon, the entire state votes by mail in ballots, which we receive like 2 weeks ahead of election day. This means I can vote when I am not at work, and don't have to miss work to do so. It's amazing, more states should implement this.
  - cvwright 8y ago
    I agree, it's very convenient. Especially because you can sit and read through the voter's pamphlet as you make your selections. On the other hand, voting by mail opens up huge opportunities for coercion or vote buying/selling.
    - craftyguy 8y ago
      > On the other hand, voting by mail opens up huge opportunities for coercion or vote buying/selling. Not any more than any current systems do. You have to sign the ballot, and if the signature does not match what you submitted in your voter registration thing, they kick it back to you. Unless you are insinuating that the USPS mail folks could collect them all and send in forgeries?
      - sp332 8y ago
        You don't sign the ballot. You sign a paper that gets sent along with the ballot. If things are done properly, the person checking your signature doesn't see your vote and the person counting your vote won't see your signature.
        craftyguy 8y ago
        Yea I wasn't totally accurate in my response. The point is, voter fraud by mail requires accurately forging a LOT of signatures. Alternatively, the state can pay for the return stamp, but will likely have to pass some tax measure to fund it (in Oregon, state budget must be balanced), so in the end voters would still be buying the stamp. This is less efficient since now there would be stamps bought that folks have no intention of using since they drop them off.
        henrikschroder 8y ago
        No need to forge signatures, you just order all your kids and grandkids to vote like you say, or they will be ostracized by the rest of the family. Or you order all your employees to vote like you say, or they will be fired. If they don't snap a pic of a ballot filled out to your liking, out the door they go. Or you just buy the votes of anyone. $50 for a pic of a "correctly" filled out ballot. That scales pretty nicely.
        craftyguy 8y ago
        I see your point, but don't agree that it 'scales pretty nicely' since it would rely on all participants keeping quiet about it, which definitely prevents it from scaling at all since you won't be able to openly advertise you are doing this without drawing fire from election officials.
      - nokcha 8y ago
        The phrase "opportunities for coercion or vote buying/selling" in the above post refers to opportunities for a malefactor to be physically present while a voter is filling out the ballot and coerce/bribe the voter to fill out the ballot a certain way. Voting at a polling place guards against this by requiring that the voter cast a ballot privately, out of the view of anyone else.
    - ridgeguy 8y ago
      I question whether the vote coercion/purchase opportunities opened up by mail voting are actually "huge" compared with in-person voting. But even if so, these opportunities don't scale easily and potential damage is limited. If some malefactor wanted to buy 1 million votes at an average price of $50 each, that's $50 million of somewhat traceable money and 1 million people, some fraction of whom are certain to reveal they were paid. It won't remain a secret, and it will leave numerous evidence trails. Contrast with fully electronic voting fraud - scalable, hard to detect, and (when well-executed) leaves little evidence to support nullifying an election and forcing a do-over.
      - saint_fiasco 8y ago
        There are ways to make it hard to trace. Suppose your boss tells you to vote for his favorite candidate or you're fired. Instead of money changing hands, there will be a threat of money ceasing to change hands, and that's much harder to prove
    - joveian 8y ago
      IIRC, last I checked something like half the states in the US allow you to get a paper ballot ahead of time for no particular reason so in those states vote by mail wouldn't change anything. I would say that vote by mail isn't always the best option depending on circumstances but today in the US there is not much vote buying or coersion and it seems like a clearly less bad option than any of the alternatives considering how they are actually implemented. I would not recommend it for Mexico, which already has widespread vote buying even without being able to verify who voters actually vote for.
    - wool_gather 8y ago
      I don't disagree, but considering that everyone has a camera in their pocket at all times -- including in the votig booth -- these days, I wonder if the opportunity gap for coercion is really all that big.
  - lalos 8y ago
    How does the stamp work to send it back? Is it free?
    - craftyguy 8y ago
      No, you buy the stamp to mail it in, or you can drop it off at various collection sites (e.g. library).
    - philipkglass 8y ago
      Washington state has had vote-by-mail for everyone for a while now too. This year they made it free to mail back the return envelope, which made a good experience even better.
      - joveian 8y ago
        IMO it should be called voter suppression when this isn't done (as in Oregon) since rural voters are less likely to have convenient drop boxes. Mild voter suppression compared to what some states are doing but still politically motivated voter suppression.
        craftyguy 8y ago
        Rural voters are likely not strangers to buying a $0.40 (or whatever they cost now) stamp and putting things in the mail, since they almost certainly have to mail other things in (e.g. bills).
    - CalRobert 8y ago
      For California at least, it's free within the US. Though I had to put a stamp on to vote from abroad.
  - Cd00d 8y ago
    Access to voting is _so_ Oregon. The rest of us are into voter suppression this year, silly hippies. Seriously, yes, that system is preferred to increasing access and activity in our democracy, but it seems there's a large contingent that feel it's in their party's best interest to not make it easier to vote. I'm sure it's fair to claim that they honestly believe their party in power is for the good of the country, but then everyone feels that way about their desired political trajectories.
    - vvanders 8y ago
      Oh it can still happen, didn't they just "lose" 4500 mail-in ballots over on one of the states earlier this week?
      - sp332 8y ago
        Georgia lost applications, not ballots. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/us/politics/senate-house-elections.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/us/politics/senate-house-... However there was an incident in Arkansas where the Democratic candidate for secretary of state was left off the ballot. https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2018/oct/22/garland-county-shuts-down-early-voting-locations-a/?page=2 https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2018/oct/22/garland-coun...
      - joveian 8y ago
        You might be thinking of Colorado where they somehow failed to notice that a truck with a bunch of ballots to be sent to voters wasn't unloaded at the post office until people started complaining that they didn't get a ballot. This is quite different from losing voted ballots or not recording a vote correctly.
  - schwank 8y ago
    As a kid in Michigan I remember my parents waiting in long lines to vote. After 20 years as a voter in Oregon I have to say our system is great. We recently received the voter guide by mail, and will receive our actual ballot shortly. Take your time filling in the scantron circles while you peruse the guide, put it in the anonymity envelope, sign it to attest, drop it at city hall or the library. I work for a major internet company, including on election systems, and yet I still love this paper system. If there is any discrepancy, they just recount. No missed work, no lines, no profiling. I read all the articles about issues with polling stations and all I can think about is systemic disenfranchisement.
    - tomjen3 8y ago
      What is the point of an anonymous envelope if you sign it? What is the point of the envelope if you do not get to drop it of in the letter box? And most importantly, who gets to write what goes into the voter guide?
      - evan_ 8y ago
        There are two envelopes. The outer envelope has your name on it, you sign that and return it. You can mail it in if you like, or drop it at special drop boxes around town (I always do this because I'm prone to waiting to the last minute.) The inner envelope is anonymous. They verify the outer envelope and open it, then pass the inner envelope to a separate area/volunteers to do the counting. The contents of the voter guide are submitted by the candidates. For ballot measures, pro- and con- statements are submitted by sponsors or members of the public. I don't have mine handy but I think they actually print several pro/con statements for each. I'm not sure how unique this is but ballot measures actually have brief statements printed on the ballot explaining what they will actually do, preventing issues where you're like "wait should I vote yes or no on this if I want this thing banned?" > A YES vote will: Instruct the legislature to write a law preventing future taxes on groceries. A NO vote will: not send any recommendation to the legislature.
        paulhebert 8y ago
  - sxcurry 8y ago
    Another Oregon voter here. I just finished filling out my ballot in the privacy of my home, with the voter pamphlet at my side for reference. So simple and sane.
- dreamdu5t 8y ago
  It's a great option but has the same problem (to smaller degree) as electronic voting machines, that the process is not entirely observable by the public.
  - donarb 8y ago
    In Washington State, every county processes mailed in ballots. These offices are required to allow observers to watch the entire counting process. You can even go to the website and watch live video from any number of cameras.
- njarboe 8y ago
  There is something nice about a person voting in a place with enforced privacy. Families filling out their ballots together on the kitchen table may be fine for most, but for others the boxes they check would be different in a private polling booth. These people are disenfranchised in with mail-in ballots.
  - motardo 8y ago
    Exactly this! Voting by mail just means my grandfather gets two votes and my grandmother gets zero.
pavel_lishin 8y ago
> “The Hart eSlate machines are not malfunctioning, the problems being reported are a result of user error — usually voters hitting a button or using the selection wheel before the screen is finished rendering,” said Sam Taylor, spokesman for the office of Secretary of State Rolando Pablos, who was appointed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. Yes, it's those stupid users' fault, of course.
- glitcher 8y ago
  Right, because the spokesman for a state government office knows best when it comes to software UX design. Oh boy.
  - talmand 8y ago
    Speaking of the alleged problem as reported is not necessarily a comment on the UX, it can be simply a reporting of the problem.
  - afarrell 8y ago
    I’m not someone who believes that you should be able to pitch manure, plan an invasion, and conn a ship. But someone can have standards for UX design without knowing about how to execute any of it. An employee of a procurement department certainly should be as part of their core competency. A spokesperson for a government procurement department should be able to communicate that if it is something the department values
    - wavefunction 8y ago
      Forgive me if I prematurely discount the UX opinions of a Gregg Abbott political appointee explaining that a laughably amateur user experience is the fault of the voters of the opposing party.
      - afarrell 8y ago
        Oh we don't disagree on that. I'm saying that this appointee should be better at UX evaluation, not that we should take their opinion as worth anything.
threatofrain 8y ago
I thought particularly interesting was the description of the UX: > In a statement to supporters Friday, Cruz cited “multiple reports” of race selections changing and added “once you select the Republican party ticket, please be patient and do not select ‘next’ until the ballot has populated all of the selections.” It reminds me of an era of "Please don't press 'Buy' twice or your credit card could be charged again."
- pasbesoin 8y ago
  It makes me think they must be recycling old POS systems from gasoline pumps -- the ones where you twiddle your thumbs, waiting for the display to update. And, any kind of real QA should have / would have caught this. Anything simulating a real user. Leaving me with no confidence whatsoever in the design, engineering, and manufacturing of this system. This problem leaves no room for benefit of the doubt.
  - jdp23 8y ago
    A lot of these machines are ancient, so quite possibly of that vintage. And yeah, in general you're very right not to have any confidence.
- ASalazarMX 8y ago
  Understandable but hardly justifiable when voting machines first were implemented, but the provider has had many years to improve their product. That they don't suggests they are paid regardless of quality, or it is working as intended.
  - usefulcat 8y ago
    I think you may be overestimating how often these machines get updated. I don't know about the internals, but as a long time TX resident I can say that the machines I saw last time I voted (2016) didn't look much if any different than the machines I saw at least 10 years ago, and probably longer. Also, there's got to be some amount of overhead related to certification and training for each new design, so the state has plenty of incentive to keep using the same machines.
dreamdu5t 8y ago
What can I do to prevent my district from using electronic voting machines? With paper ballots, I know that there's no way my selection was changed before it was given to the poll worker (who is subject to public observation). With voting machines, I have no idea what the poll worker received.
- gameswithgo 8y ago
  experts have been advising governments to not use electronic voting machines unless they can print out a paper receipt since ~1997 and nobody has listened so good luck.
  - craftyguy 8y ago
    Since all politicians operate reactively and not proactively with these sorts of things, it will take someone actually compromising an election and changing the outcome by manipulating vulnerable electronic voting machines before any action is taken. Even then, we'll probably just end up with a new model of electronic voting machine that fixes the one vulnerability used. So, good luck indeed.
    - sbenj 8y ago
      Actually, it will take someone actually compromising an election in a way that is unassailably and unquestionably broken. At that point the elected officials (who presumably have succeeded under the existing broken voting system) will rise up to fix the problem based on scientific evidence and their understanding of statistics. Thankfully we can be sure that our votes have not been compromised in the past and there are no actors in the system who might benefit from avoiding looking into possible compromises. Oh wait..
      - craftyguy 8y ago
        > At that point the elected officials (who presumably have succeeded under the existing broken voting system) will rise up to fix the problem based on scientific evidence and their understanding of statistics. What motivation do they have to fix a system that put them in office in the first place? (hint: none, there is no motivation)
clarkevans 8y ago
The Texas Hart eSlate machines do not provide receipts or other forms of paper trail So, they fail Voter Verified Paper Trail (https://www.verifiedvoting.org/verifier/#year/2018/state/48 https://www.verifiedvoting.org/verifier/#year/2018/state/48). In this case, it doesn't matter what ever you see on the final page, what is stored in the computer can't be audited. It's been 15 years since technologists have been stating that we need a voter verified paper trail.
influxed 8y ago
>“The Hart eSlate machines are not malfunctioning, the problems being reported are a result of user error — usually voters hitting a button or using the selection wheel before the screen is finished rendering,” This is a problem with the machine and the people who made it, not the people using it. "User error" is usually an poor excuse for lazy and/or bad design.
- tvanantwerp 8y ago
  Reminds me of the time I worked the polls in 2004 in NC, which was (maybe still is) using electronic touchscreen voting. I clearly remember an elderly woman with very poor fine motor control. Her hand was shaking terribly. I watched her hit the "next" button and, due to the shaking, press it multiple times and skip most of the ballot. I asked her if she wanted my help to go back and finish her ballot. She declined, saying she'd managed the vote for President and that was all she really cared about.
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    ... and that's probably very visible as "undervotes" in the counts. Looks like NC is going to switch machines soon: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article215763215.html https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/articl...
- panic 8y ago
  Not usually—always. How can you ever blame someone when software doesn't do what they expected it to? What should they have done differently? And people internalize this stuff! When poorly-written software does something unexpected, they blame themselves, calling themselves "stupid" or "not good with computers". It's not you, it's us!
olliej 8y ago
If the process for confirming your vote can change your vote the machine is fundamentally broken and should be removed from service. The end. The state should also be refunded the full cost of a redo in every district.
- tempestn 8y ago
  Agreed except that it's the individual counties that each choose and purchase their own equipment, which itself sounds like a terrible idea.
  - Glyptodon 8y ago
    ...and which is also hypothetically a violation of the equal protection clause if one actually buys the reasoning in SCOTUS's Bush v. Gore ruling.
  - jobigoud 8y ago
    I think he means the voting machine vendors should refund the state/county that purchased the malfunctioning equipment.
    - tempestn 8y ago
      Yeah, I was just pointing out that it would be counties buying the equipment, rather than the state.
thecosas 8y ago
Not exactly a dark pattern because it's not intentional... but this is a product failure, not user error. Shouldn't allow selections until they've all loaded.
- greglindahl 8y ago
  What does "intentional" mean when this equipment is used over and over and the problem never gets fixed?
- Arbitrary4657 8y ago
  I bet it is intentional.
mrweasel 8y ago
Why is the US so set on voting machine to begin with? They clearly aren't secure, and apparently they are't as user-friendly as the paper ballots they're replacing? A few months ago it was announced that Denmark is dropping all plans for electronic voting in the foreseeable future. There a to many issues with the voting machines and holding a paper ballot election is neither expensive nor complicated.
- paulddraper 8y ago
  Efficency/cost, speed of results, no 2000 hanging chad nonsense. I still think they should be paper, but those are the reasons.
  - JorgeGT 8y ago
    There's no contradiction between paper ballots and speed. In my country we all vote with paper ballots, then at the closing of the polling stations the members of each voting table punch the results of their urn into a laptop which connects to the electoral authority. In 3-4h max the elections results are out. For security however, after punching the numbers into the laptop, ballots are re-sealed into the urn and physically sent to the electoral authority, where in the following days public officers count them manually again. There has never been any meaningful deviation detected to date. This way, you have the security of paper ballots (they are on sight of party volunteers at all times) with the speed of electronic vote aggregation.
    - ASalazarMX 8y ago
      Are you Mexican? Our system is the same, but a critical factor helps it. Every citizen has a voting credential, and every booth has a list of voters. You can't vote without your id, and while you can vote in secret, you can only vote in your designated booth. This gives the system its agility. Our recent presidential election had a reliable statistical advance (PREP) at 23:00 the same day, and the next day every single vote of every remote booth was fully accounted, and the result confirmed the PREP. The Mexican electoral system is surprisingly effective, yet we have the same core problem of democracy: we need better candidates and less gullible voters :/
notacoward 8y ago
If it's user error, there should be reports of votes being switched both ways. Why do I get the feeling that's not actually the case? I can smell a pile of BS that big all the way from Massachusetts.
- ip26 8y ago
  I wonder if one or the other party is more likely to vote expressly straight-ticket, i.e. check a box that says "just vote for all Democratic/Republican candidates"
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    In most places "straight ticket" voting is more popular with some segments of the population than others. That leads to all kinds of shenanigans.
- bargl 8y ago
  I can think of a few reasonable explanations. The first being that it probably defaults to whoever is at the top of the ballot. I.E. The incumbent and in this case a Republican. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
  - notacoward 8y ago
    It's not clear from the story that defaults are relevant. Votes are made and then changed, not left blank
    - jshevek 8y ago
      I agree that this is not 'user error'. I would say its a 'poorly made interface', but bargl is right. Your initial claim was: >If it's user error, there should be reports of votes being switched both ways. Bargl gave a counter-example, showing that a lack of bi-directional changes doesn't place such constraints on the possible nature of the problem. > I can think of a few reasonable explanations. The first being that it probably defaults to whoever is at the top of the ballot. I.E. The incumbent and in this case a Republican. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." He wasn't claiming that the defaults must be relevant, only that they could be relevant.
cesarb 8y ago
> “The Hart eSlate machines are not malfunctioning, the problems being reported are a result of user error — usually voters hitting a button or using the selection wheel before the screen is finished rendering,” That reminds me of the Therac-25: "They determined that data entry speed during editing was the key factor in producing the error condition: If the prescription data was edited at a fast pace (as is natural for someone who has repeated the procedure a large number of times), the overdose occurred." (http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf)
- Jtsummers 8y ago
  I was going to say something similar. In the Therac case, at least part of the fault fell with the operators who should have known what to look for (if things had been well documented and they'd been trained). But this is a rare event, every year (at most) or every 2 or 4 years, for most voters. You expect computers to work these days and to be responsive so the idea that users are at fault for crappy UI/UX is absurd. If something seems to be working then the user in this case has no reason to doubt it because they haven't used these systems with sufficient frequency to be aware of its poor quality and how to respond to it.
  - ASalazarMX 8y ago
    > In the Therac case, at least part of the fault fell with the operators who should have known what to look for (if things had been well documented and they'd been trained). This. Even a humble accountant usually reverses entry errors immediately, yet this critical input was harder to double check.
    - inlined 8y ago
      As I recall correctly, when the technician typed too quickly a subsystem crashed. There was no training for that and no obvious feedback mechanism.
- 08-15 8y ago
  But note the crucial difference: In the case of the Therac-25, this was merely the explanation, and explaining what causes an issue is crucial to fixing it. It was treated as a software problem, and the vendor was liable. Here it's used to inappropriately blame the user. The state of Texas should sue Hart eSlate and cite the Therac-25 story to argue that 30 years later, anyone halfway competent should know how to avoid race conditions in a user interface.
randcraw 8y ago
Does the machine flip the user's straight-ticket UNIFORMLY across the possible parties? Or does it seem to favor one party over all the others? If this is really user error, the simplest solution for this is for half the machines to place the republican straight ticket first on the wheel, and on the other half, to place the democrat straight ticket first. But somehow I think that level of fair-mindedness will be unlikely. (BTW, I lived in TX for a bit, so my jaundice was fairly earned.)
- brigade 8y ago
  For these machines, apparently incumbents are selected by default. Which in Texas are predominantly republican of course.
  - mcintyre1994 8y ago
    Smart and incredibly unethnical sales strategy assuming those incumbents have some say in who gets that contract.
csel 8y ago
“The Hart eSlate machines are not malfunctioning, the problems being reported are a result of user error — usually voters hitting a button or using the selection wheel before the screen is finished rendering" More like a page loading issue. Probably need to look at optimizing the page or display a simple big "LOADING..." in the middle of the screen while all fields and field values are being loaded. Also disable the actual page (all submit or selection buttons) while page is being loaded. Definitely not user error. Different locations have different internet connection speed that will effect page loading.
- bostik 8y ago
  > Different locations have different internet connection speed that will effect page loading. Wait, what? Are you claiming that these insecure, unusable, unfit-for-purpose excuses for a POS machines are also INTERNET-CONNECTED? (For the record: if the page render after an action takes more than 100ms under any circumstances, the system is by definition broken. That's the lowest of the Nielsen thresholds.)
delecti 8y ago
I'm strongly opposed to voting machines, but if we're going to be stuck with them, enabling "straight ticket" as an easy selection shouldn't be an option. I even vote "straight ticket", so I understand why a person might, but we should aspire to it not being necessary, and shouldn't enable it. I'd even go as far as to say that it would make sense to not even list the party on ballots. If the only information a person has about a candidate is their name and the (D) or (R) next to it, they might just not be informed about that particular race. I'm less sure of that opinion though, and wouldn't defend it as ardently.
- jshevek 8y ago
  I would agree that democracy works better the more informed the voters are, however the very idea of taking steps to discourage 'voting while ignorant' is highly controversial in the US. We have a history of disenfranchising voters which is at the back of most people minds when the topic comes up.
  - delecti 8y ago
    If someone would choose to not vote in a particular race on their ballot because they didn't know which candidate was the (D) and which was the (R) that's hardly disenfranchisement. But it's also not the main point I was trying to argue.
MiddleEndian 8y ago
Voting machines are inherently wrong because any bugs are unacceptable, especially in this case where "performance" is irrelevant. Paper and pen(cil) is the way to go. Draw a line, that's it. No fuckery.
- greglindahl 8y ago
  Isn't it better to measure every device, including paper and pencil, to see what sorts of errors you get with each?
  - MiddleEndian 8y ago
    In theory, maybe. In practice, how do we do that? There have been zero successful investigations as a result of "flaky" voting machines in America to my knowledge. And what are the incentives for using voting machines? They are harder to verify than people from multiple parties counting lines drawn on a sheet of paper. They are susceptible to conflicts of interest, general incompetence, and security risks.
    - greglindahl 8y ago
      I've read a few studies in the past. What you do to experiment is send people to use the equipment, then quiz them about how they voted, and see what the equipment says they voted. Problems like the confusing "butterfly ballot" in the famous Florida election pop right out. You can also look at issues like undervotes and overvotes from the actual election. And ask people if they have any complaints about the process. This is all somewhat studied already. We should study it a lot more. This is in addition to doing systematic post-election recounts of a small % of ballots to verify that the counting machines are working. Finally, everything is a voting "machine", including optical scan cards. Even if hand-counted. You should measure how well they work.
      - MiddleEndian 8y ago
        Even if we somehow verify that reliable machines exist, how do we verify that the machines haven't been tampered with? So far we've seen all sorts of problems with the machines in practice, usually in favor of the party in power. What's our incentive to switch to machines? Speed isn't a concern here.
rhacker 8y ago
I like how flippantly disregarding the authorities are about this. Oh just make sure to sloooow down folks! No mention if the people complaining were allowed to change their votes. YET someone that is barred from voting, someone that did jail time typically, is thrown in the fucking slammer for one vote cast (and they typically didn't even know they were not allowed to).
- tssva 8y ago
  The machines in question display all of your selections on a separate screen for the voter to review and approve before the ballot is cast. Since the voters noticed a change they either noticed it before getting to this screen or on this screen. Either way they had an opportunity to go back and change their vote before the ballot was cast.
naikrovek 8y ago
One thing I've always wondered is why electronic voting machines aren't code reviewed AT LEAST as much as slot machines. Electronic gambling devices are intensely code reviewed. It's the law. Why not electronic voting machines? That said, paper ballots and hand counting are the answer for secure and accurate vote counts.
- wlll 8y ago
  > One thing I've always wondered is why electronic voting machines aren't code reviewed AT LEAST as much as slot machines. One reason could be if the people who would legislate on this benefit when voting machines don't work properly?
  - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    "There's no way I was legitimately voted in! Clearly the voting machines broke!"
- detcader 8y ago
  Use of slot machines make businesses money. Use of voting machines...
  - jobigoud 8y ago
    make businesses money?
- jbigelow76 8y ago
  Regulations seem to me like they are always reactionary to bad shit happening, we're just too dumb to be prescient enough to get ahead of the problems because we are too arrogant to think we'll make the same mistakes we always make and because we think our intentions are insurance against those mistakes if they do happen.
  - janekm 8y ago
    One problem with voting machines is that "bad stuff happening" can be beneficial to the people in charge of overseeing them, quite the opposite of gambling machines.
CivBase 8y ago
Has anyone here worked on developing a voting machine? Why is this such a complicated problem? There doesn't seem to be any many issues to consider when designing the interface, logic, and storage for one of these machines. I feel like many programmers could develop something like this in a matter of hours. I can imagine some issues if you try to introduce networking, but I don't see any reason why networking should be necessary. Just keep it simple. Many people advocate for paper and pencil because of it's simplicity, but it should be obvious why that is potentially a much more complicated solution. It relies on humans to record and later read a large amount of information delivered in small chunks. Humans are terrible at that! Getting a machine to read data from the printed page hardly seems any more trivial. That's not even to mention the potential issues that arise from managing the large amount of physical voting cards. If anyone has worked on one of these machines, I'd be very interested to hear their thoughts on the matter.
- saidajigumi 8y ago
  > Why is this such a complicated problem? Because a software/hardware solution is inherently inscrutable to the overwhelming majority of the population. It's amenable to hacking and not amenable to auditing. The problem is NOT "build a zero-stakes voting web app", it's more like "build a voting machine which ensures the voter can audit their vote and election auditors can audit election tallies with full transparency, and with a threat model of people trying to hack the voting machines to control election results". Getting better than pencil, scannable paper ballots, and auditors from all (political) parties involved in that election to cover vote counting / recounts –– that's the really, really hard part.
  - CivBase 8y ago
    Are you saying it's a public consciousness thing, then? When I vote, it is my understanding that when I stuff my paper ballot into the box (or sometimes even just hand it over to someone), I am forced to trust the staff to account for my vote. Personally, I don't feel like I'm any more protected against bad actors by using pencil-and-paper. The only truly-auditable solution I can think of is to have everyone make their vote public, but that is obviously not a reasonable solution.
poulsbohemian 8y ago
Voting by mail, as we have in Washington and Oregon, makes it so easy to vote. And, now we don't even need a stamp on our ballots. I don't know that any system is perfect, but one really has no excuse to not vote and to vote accurately when they have plenty of time and can do it from the comfort of their home.
- greiskul 8y ago
  Voting by mail is an abomination that goes entirely against the idea of a secret ballot, allowing voter coercion, and sometimes even voting fraud. There is a reason most democracies don't do it.
  - poulsbohemian 8y ago
    We have loads of disenfranchised people, deliberately put in that spot by manipulative voter ID policies, along with report after report about security flaws in voting machines. Tell me again what’s wrong with voting by mail?
mikeash 8y ago
Essentially every computer expert says that using computers for voting is a really bad idea. We do it anyway. Is there any other area where we do something like this?
- paulhebert 8y ago
  Off the top of my head, people regularly ignore environmental scientists on environmental policy and doctors on personal health habits.
- scottmf 8y ago
  It’s like this in many other areas including healthcare access/cost, environmental policy, drug policy, etc.
fromthestart 8y ago
This is so ridiculous. What kind of ancient hardware are these garbage machines running that they have race conditions with such large time windows? How is it possible that in 2018 our electronic voting systems are so broken? Is it really so difficult to build a basic UI and tally choices securely?
newnewpdro 8y ago
When your implementation is indefensible, always blame the user.
int_19h 8y ago
We need a federal law that outright bans voting machines for all federal elections that Congress has control over (it'll get rid of them entirely in practice, because no-one will want to waste time and money by maintaining parallel systems). That will solve all the immediate issues. Think of it as the equivalent of taking down a compromised server. Then, companies that make those things can go back to the drawing table, actually think about what they're making this time, and try to convince us all that they did it right. It'll take a lot of convincing, and that's exactly how it should be. For starters, I'd want to hear about the exact problem being solved. What would it take to make this happen? It feels like something that would carry more weight if the initial push came from the IT industry. People will listen better to something like, "I'm a software engineer with 20 years of experience, and in my educated opinion, electronic voting should be banned."
- dawnerd 8y ago
  All states should do what Oregon does (with optional paper ballet on election day). Opt everyone in when you get an id, none of this register to vote nonsense. Send everyone a ballet in the mail and do mail in or drop off ballots. I really don't get why it's so hard for more people to get behind, other than the whole, trying to prevent certain groups from voting.
- tomohawk 8y ago
  Make it a federal crime for voting machines to be inaccurate and allow civil lawsuits about same. Budget a mandatory spend to investigate a randomly selected number of precincts after each election. A main problem with voting machines is that they are a form of outsourcing of a government function which is critical to our society and our form of government. If we are to have machines, those producing them must be held accountable.
  - philwelch 8y ago
    There's even an existing mechanism for this. Just like with buildings and bridges and the like, any voting machine could have a publicly registered design formally signed and sealed by a licensed Professional Engineer who is willing to accept criminal liability for any faults in the design.
mrfusion 8y ago
I’ve always wanted a button to vote a straight anti-incumbent ticket. Or at least I think they should display incumbent status on the ballot. That seems more important than party to me.
rrix2 8y ago
"I have to admit it's behaving rather erratically" https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/comic/page/42 https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/comic/page/42 (November 2005)
SeanBoocock 8y ago
I live in Austin and have been voting with these machines for the last 8 years, including earlier this week. The UI for the ballot is a series of rectangular tiles separated into two columns on a series of pages. Each tile represents a given race or proposition, with a title header, a description field, and then the various options to vote for stacked vertically as a collection of { radio button, option title }. In order to navigate between pages, there are two digital "arrow" buttons for "Next" and "Back". To navigate within a page, and then within a tile, there is a clicky scroll wheel (rotation quantized in something on the order of 30 degree increments). To make a selection there is a separate button digital button "Enter". The way the straight party selection is presented is as the first tile on the first page of partisan ballot options. Selecting straight party isn't a separate option on the underlying ballot; rather it is UI layer feature that fills in all of the partisan election options with the party of choice as if you had individually selected all of them. I've never experienced the phenomenon described in the article, but I can imagine how it might happen. There is visible latency in interactions (selecting an option, moving between options/pages) and I could imagine someone selecting the straight party choice, pressing "Enter", not seeing an immediate result and pressing Enter again while rotating the wheel, and then being confused when they see the first partisan election race not reflecting their vote because they inadvertently made another selection on that race. This seems like an easy thing to address and something that could/should have come up in UX usability testing. If anything should go through rigorous accessibility and usability testing, it should be voting processes (and that hold for whether elections are mediated by machines, paper ballots, or some other method).
- Izkata 8y ago
  Based on the "wait for all candidates to have loaded" description, I had a thought that no one else seems to have had yet, and you may be able to confirm it as a possibility: Do the names ever shift around? The thought is, lets say there's 3 candidates, Alex, Becky, and Carl, and they're supposed to show in that order. But due to the slow loading time, you first see Becky and Carl, then Alex loads in a moment later and the other two shift down. Since you've described the straight party selection as a separate button/option, the thought I had was, what if picking that is supposed to choose Becky, so Option 2. But if you hit it too soon, you've selected Becky as Option 1. And then Alex loads in and Becky becomes Option 2, but the vote didn't shift - it's still on Option 1. Does that sound like a possibility, with your experience with these machines?
rgejman 8y ago
This is a forum populated with thousands of smart and talented engineers all discussing the absurdity of US voting systems and suggesting great fixes. There is clearly a problem to be solved here—and it might even be lucrative to solve it. Seems like a reasonable idea for a startup company: making cheap, audit-able polling devices that can be sold to any county in the country and any country in the world. Someone here should take a stab at it.
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  Or, as engineers, we can propose an existing solution that is trustworthy and well-proved: pen and paper. It has proved its reliability in thousands of elections. It is cheap, universally-understood and basically impossible to subvert to a meaningful level of impact. It is understood by everyone who can vote. Democracy doesn't need us to show off how clever and creative we are. It needs boring, simple, reliable mechanisms.
pinwheel 8y ago
It seems the system could be configured to default to 'no selection' rather than default to one choice or another. Then the 'page rendering' issue can be absolved of artificial influence perceived or otherwise.
samat 8y ago
They are basically admitting it’s faulty when telling ‘it’s users mistake and there are lots of users like this’.

266 points by threatofrain 8y ago

clircle 8y ago

I do and will always advise my friends and family to vote by mail in ballot (if allowed).

craftyguy 8y ago
In Oregon, the entire state votes by mail in ballots, which we receive like 2 weeks ahead of election day. This means I can vote when I am not at work, and don't have to miss work to do so. It's amazing, more states should implement this.
- cvwright 8y ago
  I agree, it's very convenient. Especially because you can sit and read through the voter's pamphlet as you make your selections. On the other hand, voting by mail opens up huge opportunities for coercion or vote buying/selling.
  - craftyguy 8y ago
    > On the other hand, voting by mail opens up huge opportunities for coercion or vote buying/selling. Not any more than any current systems do. You have to sign the ballot, and if the signature does not match what you submitted in your voter registration thing, they kick it back to you. Unless you are insinuating that the USPS mail folks could collect them all and send in forgeries?
    - sp332 8y ago
      You don't sign the ballot. You sign a paper that gets sent along with the ballot. If things are done properly, the person checking your signature doesn't see your vote and the person counting your vote won't see your signature.
      - craftyguy 8y ago
        Yea I wasn't totally accurate in my response. The point is, voter fraud by mail requires accurately forging a LOT of signatures. Alternatively, the state can pay for the return stamp, but will likely have to pass some tax measure to fund it (in Oregon, state budget must be balanced), so in the end voters would still be buying the stamp. This is less efficient since now there would be stamps bought that folks have no intention of using since they drop them off.
        henrikschroder 8y ago
        No need to forge signatures, you just order all your kids and grandkids to vote like you say, or they will be ostracized by the rest of the family. Or you order all your employees to vote like you say, or they will be fired. If they don't snap a pic of a ballot filled out to your liking, out the door they go. Or you just buy the votes of anyone. $50 for a pic of a "correctly" filled out ballot. That scales pretty nicely.
        craftyguy 8y ago
        I see your point, but don't agree that it 'scales pretty nicely' since it would rely on all participants keeping quiet about it, which definitely prevents it from scaling at all since you won't be able to openly advertise you are doing this without drawing fire from election officials.
    - nokcha 8y ago
      The phrase "opportunities for coercion or vote buying/selling" in the above post refers to opportunities for a malefactor to be physically present while a voter is filling out the ballot and coerce/bribe the voter to fill out the ballot a certain way. Voting at a polling place guards against this by requiring that the voter cast a ballot privately, out of the view of anyone else.
  - ridgeguy 8y ago
    I question whether the vote coercion/purchase opportunities opened up by mail voting are actually "huge" compared with in-person voting. But even if so, these opportunities don't scale easily and potential damage is limited. If some malefactor wanted to buy 1 million votes at an average price of $50 each, that's $50 million of somewhat traceable money and 1 million people, some fraction of whom are certain to reveal they were paid. It won't remain a secret, and it will leave numerous evidence trails. Contrast with fully electronic voting fraud - scalable, hard to detect, and (when well-executed) leaves little evidence to support nullifying an election and forcing a do-over.
    - saint_fiasco 8y ago
      There are ways to make it hard to trace. Suppose your boss tells you to vote for his favorite candidate or you're fired. Instead of money changing hands, there will be a threat of money ceasing to change hands, and that's much harder to prove
  - joveian 8y ago
    IIRC, last I checked something like half the states in the US allow you to get a paper ballot ahead of time for no particular reason so in those states vote by mail wouldn't change anything. I would say that vote by mail isn't always the best option depending on circumstances but today in the US there is not much vote buying or coersion and it seems like a clearly less bad option than any of the alternatives considering how they are actually implemented. I would not recommend it for Mexico, which already has widespread vote buying even without being able to verify who voters actually vote for.
  - wool_gather 8y ago
    I don't disagree, but considering that everyone has a camera in their pocket at all times -- including in the votig booth -- these days, I wonder if the opportunity gap for coercion is really all that big.
- lalos 8y ago
  How does the stamp work to send it back? Is it free?
  - craftyguy 8y ago
    No, you buy the stamp to mail it in, or you can drop it off at various collection sites (e.g. library).
  - philipkglass 8y ago
    Washington state has had vote-by-mail for everyone for a while now too. This year they made it free to mail back the return envelope, which made a good experience even better.
    - joveian 8y ago
      IMO it should be called voter suppression when this isn't done (as in Oregon) since rural voters are less likely to have convenient drop boxes. Mild voter suppression compared to what some states are doing but still politically motivated voter suppression.
      - craftyguy 8y ago
        Rural voters are likely not strangers to buying a $0.40 (or whatever they cost now) stamp and putting things in the mail, since they almost certainly have to mail other things in (e.g. bills).
  - CalRobert 8y ago
    For California at least, it's free within the US. Though I had to put a stamp on to vote from abroad.
- Cd00d 8y ago
  Access to voting is _so_ Oregon. The rest of us are into voter suppression this year, silly hippies. Seriously, yes, that system is preferred to increasing access and activity in our democracy, but it seems there's a large contingent that feel it's in their party's best interest to not make it easier to vote. I'm sure it's fair to claim that they honestly believe their party in power is for the good of the country, but then everyone feels that way about their desired political trajectories.
  - vvanders 8y ago
    Oh it can still happen, didn't they just "lose" 4500 mail-in ballots over on one of the states earlier this week?
    - sp332 8y ago
      Georgia lost applications, not ballots. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/us/politics/senate-house-elections.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/us/politics/senate-house-... However there was an incident in Arkansas where the Democratic candidate for secretary of state was left off the ballot. https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2018/oct/22/garland-county-shuts-down-early-voting-locations-a/?page=2 https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2018/oct/22/garland-coun...
    - joveian 8y ago
      You might be thinking of Colorado where they somehow failed to notice that a truck with a bunch of ballots to be sent to voters wasn't unloaded at the post office until people started complaining that they didn't get a ballot. This is quite different from losing voted ballots or not recording a vote correctly.
- schwank 8y ago
  As a kid in Michigan I remember my parents waiting in long lines to vote. After 20 years as a voter in Oregon I have to say our system is great. We recently received the voter guide by mail, and will receive our actual ballot shortly. Take your time filling in the scantron circles while you peruse the guide, put it in the anonymity envelope, sign it to attest, drop it at city hall or the library. I work for a major internet company, including on election systems, and yet I still love this paper system. If there is any discrepancy, they just recount. No missed work, no lines, no profiling. I read all the articles about issues with polling stations and all I can think about is systemic disenfranchisement.
  - tomjen3 8y ago
    What is the point of an anonymous envelope if you sign it? What is the point of the envelope if you do not get to drop it of in the letter box? And most importantly, who gets to write what goes into the voter guide?
    - evan_ 8y ago
      There are two envelopes. The outer envelope has your name on it, you sign that and return it. You can mail it in if you like, or drop it at special drop boxes around town (I always do this because I'm prone to waiting to the last minute.) The inner envelope is anonymous. They verify the outer envelope and open it, then pass the inner envelope to a separate area/volunteers to do the counting. The contents of the voter guide are submitted by the candidates. For ballot measures, pro- and con- statements are submitted by sponsors or members of the public. I don't have mine handy but I think they actually print several pro/con statements for each. I'm not sure how unique this is but ballot measures actually have brief statements printed on the ballot explaining what they will actually do, preventing issues where you're like "wait should I vote yes or no on this if I want this thing banned?" > A YES vote will: Instruct the legislature to write a law preventing future taxes on groceries. A NO vote will: not send any recommendation to the legislature.
      - paulhebert 8y ago
- sxcurry 8y ago
  Another Oregon voter here. I just finished filling out my ballot in the privacy of my home, with the voter pamphlet at my side for reference. So simple and sane.
dreamdu5t 8y ago
It's a great option but has the same problem (to smaller degree) as electronic voting machines, that the process is not entirely observable by the public.
- donarb 8y ago
  In Washington State, every county processes mailed in ballots. These offices are required to allow observers to watch the entire counting process. You can even go to the website and watch live video from any number of cameras.
njarboe 8y ago
There is something nice about a person voting in a place with enforced privacy. Families filling out their ballots together on the kitchen table may be fine for most, but for others the boxes they check would be different in a private polling booth. These people are disenfranchised in with mail-in ballots.
- motardo 8y ago
  Exactly this! Voting by mail just means my grandfather gets two votes and my grandmother gets zero.

pavel_lishin 8y ago

> “The Hart eSlate machines are not malfunctioning, the problems being reported are a result of user error — usually voters hitting a button or using the selection wheel before the screen is finished rendering,” said Sam Taylor, spokesman for the office of Secretary of State Rolando Pablos, who was appointed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. Yes, it's those stupid users' fault, of course.

glitcher 8y ago
Right, because the spokesman for a state government office knows best when it comes to software UX design. Oh boy.
- talmand 8y ago
  Speaking of the alleged problem as reported is not necessarily a comment on the UX, it can be simply a reporting of the problem.
- afarrell 8y ago
  I’m not someone who believes that you should be able to pitch manure, plan an invasion, and conn a ship. But someone can have standards for UX design without knowing about how to execute any of it. An employee of a procurement department certainly should be as part of their core competency. A spokesperson for a government procurement department should be able to communicate that if it is something the department values
  - wavefunction 8y ago
    Forgive me if I prematurely discount the UX opinions of a Gregg Abbott political appointee explaining that a laughably amateur user experience is the fault of the voters of the opposing party.
    - afarrell 8y ago
      Oh we don't disagree on that. I'm saying that this appointee should be better at UX evaluation, not that we should take their opinion as worth anything.

threatofrain 8y ago

I thought particularly interesting was the description of the UX: > In a statement to supporters Friday, Cruz cited “multiple reports” of race selections changing and added “once you select the Republican party ticket, please be patient and do not select ‘next’ until the ballot has populated all of the selections.” It reminds me of an era of "Please don't press 'Buy' twice or your credit card could be charged again."

pasbesoin 8y ago
It makes me think they must be recycling old POS systems from gasoline pumps -- the ones where you twiddle your thumbs, waiting for the display to update. And, any kind of real QA should have / would have caught this. Anything simulating a real user. Leaving me with no confidence whatsoever in the design, engineering, and manufacturing of this system. This problem leaves no room for benefit of the doubt.
- jdp23 8y ago
  A lot of these machines are ancient, so quite possibly of that vintage. And yeah, in general you're very right not to have any confidence.
ASalazarMX 8y ago
Understandable but hardly justifiable when voting machines first were implemented, but the provider has had many years to improve their product. That they don't suggests they are paid regardless of quality, or it is working as intended.
- usefulcat 8y ago
  I think you may be overestimating how often these machines get updated. I don't know about the internals, but as a long time TX resident I can say that the machines I saw last time I voted (2016) didn't look much if any different than the machines I saw at least 10 years ago, and probably longer. Also, there's got to be some amount of overhead related to certification and training for each new design, so the state has plenty of incentive to keep using the same machines.

dreamdu5t 8y ago

What can I do to prevent my district from using electronic voting machines? With paper ballots, I know that there's no way my selection was changed before it was given to the poll worker (who is subject to public observation). With voting machines, I have no idea what the poll worker received.

gameswithgo 8y ago
experts have been advising governments to not use electronic voting machines unless they can print out a paper receipt since ~1997 and nobody has listened so good luck.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  Since all politicians operate reactively and not proactively with these sorts of things, it will take someone actually compromising an election and changing the outcome by manipulating vulnerable electronic voting machines before any action is taken. Even then, we'll probably just end up with a new model of electronic voting machine that fixes the one vulnerability used. So, good luck indeed.
  - sbenj 8y ago
    Actually, it will take someone actually compromising an election in a way that is unassailably and unquestionably broken. At that point the elected officials (who presumably have succeeded under the existing broken voting system) will rise up to fix the problem based on scientific evidence and their understanding of statistics. Thankfully we can be sure that our votes have not been compromised in the past and there are no actors in the system who might benefit from avoiding looking into possible compromises. Oh wait..
    - craftyguy 8y ago
      > At that point the elected officials (who presumably have succeeded under the existing broken voting system) will rise up to fix the problem based on scientific evidence and their understanding of statistics. What motivation do they have to fix a system that put them in office in the first place? (hint: none, there is no motivation)

clarkevans 8y ago

The Texas Hart eSlate machines do not provide receipts or other forms of paper trail So, they fail Voter Verified Paper Trail (https://www.verifiedvoting.org/verifier/#year/2018/state/48 https://www.verifiedvoting.org/verifier/#year/2018/state/48). In this case, it doesn't matter what ever you see on the final page, what is stored in the computer can't be audited. It's been 15 years since technologists have been stating that we need a voter verified paper trail.

influxed 8y ago

>“The Hart eSlate machines are not malfunctioning, the problems being reported are a result of user error — usually voters hitting a button or using the selection wheel before the screen is finished rendering,” This is a problem with the machine and the people who made it, not the people using it. "User error" is usually an poor excuse for lazy and/or bad design.

tvanantwerp 8y ago
Reminds me of the time I worked the polls in 2004 in NC, which was (maybe still is) using electronic touchscreen voting. I clearly remember an elderly woman with very poor fine motor control. Her hand was shaking terribly. I watched her hit the "next" button and, due to the shaking, press it multiple times and skip most of the ballot. I asked her if she wanted my help to go back and finish her ballot. She declined, saying she'd managed the vote for President and that was all she really cared about.
- greglindahl 8y ago
  ... and that's probably very visible as "undervotes" in the counts. Looks like NC is going to switch machines soon: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article215763215.html https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/articl...
panic 8y ago
Not usually—always. How can you ever blame someone when software doesn't do what they expected it to? What should they have done differently? And people internalize this stuff! When poorly-written software does something unexpected, they blame themselves, calling themselves "stupid" or "not good with computers". It's not you, it's us!

olliej 8y ago

If the process for confirming your vote can change your vote the machine is fundamentally broken and should be removed from service. The end. The state should also be refunded the full cost of a redo in every district.

tempestn 8y ago
Agreed except that it's the individual counties that each choose and purchase their own equipment, which itself sounds like a terrible idea.
- Glyptodon 8y ago
  ...and which is also hypothetically a violation of the equal protection clause if one actually buys the reasoning in SCOTUS's Bush v. Gore ruling.
- jobigoud 8y ago
  I think he means the voting machine vendors should refund the state/county that purchased the malfunctioning equipment.
  - tempestn 8y ago
    Yeah, I was just pointing out that it would be counties buying the equipment, rather than the state.

thecosas 8y ago

Not exactly a dark pattern because it's not intentional... but this is a product failure, not user error. Shouldn't allow selections until they've all loaded.

greglindahl 8y ago
What does "intentional" mean when this equipment is used over and over and the problem never gets fixed?
Arbitrary4657 8y ago
I bet it is intentional.

mrweasel 8y ago

Why is the US so set on voting machine to begin with? They clearly aren't secure, and apparently they are't as user-friendly as the paper ballots they're replacing? A few months ago it was announced that Denmark is dropping all plans for electronic voting in the foreseeable future. There a to many issues with the voting machines and holding a paper ballot election is neither expensive nor complicated.

paulddraper 8y ago
Efficency/cost, speed of results, no 2000 hanging chad nonsense. I still think they should be paper, but those are the reasons.
- JorgeGT 8y ago
  There's no contradiction between paper ballots and speed. In my country we all vote with paper ballots, then at the closing of the polling stations the members of each voting table punch the results of their urn into a laptop which connects to the electoral authority. In 3-4h max the elections results are out. For security however, after punching the numbers into the laptop, ballots are re-sealed into the urn and physically sent to the electoral authority, where in the following days public officers count them manually again. There has never been any meaningful deviation detected to date. This way, you have the security of paper ballots (they are on sight of party volunteers at all times) with the speed of electronic vote aggregation.
  - ASalazarMX 8y ago
    Are you Mexican? Our system is the same, but a critical factor helps it. Every citizen has a voting credential, and every booth has a list of voters. You can't vote without your id, and while you can vote in secret, you can only vote in your designated booth. This gives the system its agility. Our recent presidential election had a reliable statistical advance (PREP) at 23:00 the same day, and the next day every single vote of every remote booth was fully accounted, and the result confirmed the PREP. The Mexican electoral system is surprisingly effective, yet we have the same core problem of democracy: we need better candidates and less gullible voters :/

notacoward 8y ago

If it's user error, there should be reports of votes being switched both ways. Why do I get the feeling that's not actually the case? I can smell a pile of BS that big all the way from Massachusetts.

ip26 8y ago
I wonder if one or the other party is more likely to vote expressly straight-ticket, i.e. check a box that says "just vote for all Democratic/Republican candidates"
- greglindahl 8y ago
  In most places "straight ticket" voting is more popular with some segments of the population than others. That leads to all kinds of shenanigans.
bargl 8y ago
I can think of a few reasonable explanations. The first being that it probably defaults to whoever is at the top of the ballot. I.E. The incumbent and in this case a Republican. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
- notacoward 8y ago
  It's not clear from the story that defaults are relevant. Votes are made and then changed, not left blank
  - jshevek 8y ago
    I agree that this is not 'user error'. I would say its a 'poorly made interface', but bargl is right. Your initial claim was: >If it's user error, there should be reports of votes being switched both ways. Bargl gave a counter-example, showing that a lack of bi-directional changes doesn't place such constraints on the possible nature of the problem. > I can think of a few reasonable explanations. The first being that it probably defaults to whoever is at the top of the ballot. I.E. The incumbent and in this case a Republican. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." He wasn't claiming that the defaults must be relevant, only that they could be relevant.

cesarb 8y ago

> “The Hart eSlate machines are not malfunctioning, the problems being reported are a result of user error — usually voters hitting a button or using the selection wheel before the screen is finished rendering,” That reminds me of the Therac-25: "They determined that data entry speed during editing was the key factor in producing the error condition: If the prescription data was edited at a fast pace (as is natural for someone who has repeated the procedure a large number of times), the overdose occurred." (http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf)

Jtsummers 8y ago
I was going to say something similar. In the Therac case, at least part of the fault fell with the operators who should have known what to look for (if things had been well documented and they'd been trained). But this is a rare event, every year (at most) or every 2 or 4 years, for most voters. You expect computers to work these days and to be responsive so the idea that users are at fault for crappy UI/UX is absurd. If something seems to be working then the user in this case has no reason to doubt it because they haven't used these systems with sufficient frequency to be aware of its poor quality and how to respond to it.
- ASalazarMX 8y ago
  > In the Therac case, at least part of the fault fell with the operators who should have known what to look for (if things had been well documented and they'd been trained). This. Even a humble accountant usually reverses entry errors immediately, yet this critical input was harder to double check.
  - inlined 8y ago
    As I recall correctly, when the technician typed too quickly a subsystem crashed. There was no training for that and no obvious feedback mechanism.
08-15 8y ago
But note the crucial difference: In the case of the Therac-25, this was merely the explanation, and explaining what causes an issue is crucial to fixing it. It was treated as a software problem, and the vendor was liable. Here it's used to inappropriately blame the user. The state of Texas should sue Hart eSlate and cite the Therac-25 story to argue that 30 years later, anyone halfway competent should know how to avoid race conditions in a user interface.

randcraw 8y ago

Does the machine flip the user's straight-ticket UNIFORMLY across the possible parties? Or does it seem to favor one party over all the others? If this is really user error, the simplest solution for this is for half the machines to place the republican straight ticket first on the wheel, and on the other half, to place the democrat straight ticket first. But somehow I think that level of fair-mindedness will be unlikely. (BTW, I lived in TX for a bit, so my jaundice was fairly earned.)

brigade 8y ago
For these machines, apparently incumbents are selected by default. Which in Texas are predominantly republican of course.
- mcintyre1994 8y ago
  Smart and incredibly unethnical sales strategy assuming those incumbents have some say in who gets that contract.

csel 8y ago

“The Hart eSlate machines are not malfunctioning, the problems being reported are a result of user error — usually voters hitting a button or using the selection wheel before the screen is finished rendering" More like a page loading issue. Probably need to look at optimizing the page or display a simple big "LOADING..." in the middle of the screen while all fields and field values are being loaded. Also disable the actual page (all submit or selection buttons) while page is being loaded. Definitely not user error. Different locations have different internet connection speed that will effect page loading.

bostik 8y ago
> Different locations have different internet connection speed that will effect page loading. Wait, what? Are you claiming that these insecure, unusable, unfit-for-purpose excuses for a POS machines are also INTERNET-CONNECTED? (For the record: if the page render after an action takes more than 100ms under any circumstances, the system is by definition broken. That's the lowest of the Nielsen thresholds.)

delecti 8y ago

I'm strongly opposed to voting machines, but if we're going to be stuck with them, enabling "straight ticket" as an easy selection shouldn't be an option. I even vote "straight ticket", so I understand why a person might, but we should aspire to it not being necessary, and shouldn't enable it. I'd even go as far as to say that it would make sense to not even list the party on ballots. If the only information a person has about a candidate is their name and the (D) or (R) next to it, they might just not be informed about that particular race. I'm less sure of that opinion though, and wouldn't defend it as ardently.

jshevek 8y ago
I would agree that democracy works better the more informed the voters are, however the very idea of taking steps to discourage 'voting while ignorant' is highly controversial in the US. We have a history of disenfranchising voters which is at the back of most people minds when the topic comes up.
- delecti 8y ago
  If someone would choose to not vote in a particular race on their ballot because they didn't know which candidate was the (D) and which was the (R) that's hardly disenfranchisement. But it's also not the main point I was trying to argue.

MiddleEndian 8y ago

Voting machines are inherently wrong because any bugs are unacceptable, especially in this case where "performance" is irrelevant. Paper and pen(cil) is the way to go. Draw a line, that's it. No fuckery.

greglindahl 8y ago
Isn't it better to measure every device, including paper and pencil, to see what sorts of errors you get with each?
- MiddleEndian 8y ago
  In theory, maybe. In practice, how do we do that? There have been zero successful investigations as a result of "flaky" voting machines in America to my knowledge. And what are the incentives for using voting machines? They are harder to verify than people from multiple parties counting lines drawn on a sheet of paper. They are susceptible to conflicts of interest, general incompetence, and security risks.
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    I've read a few studies in the past. What you do to experiment is send people to use the equipment, then quiz them about how they voted, and see what the equipment says they voted. Problems like the confusing "butterfly ballot" in the famous Florida election pop right out. You can also look at issues like undervotes and overvotes from the actual election. And ask people if they have any complaints about the process. This is all somewhat studied already. We should study it a lot more. This is in addition to doing systematic post-election recounts of a small % of ballots to verify that the counting machines are working. Finally, everything is a voting "machine", including optical scan cards. Even if hand-counted. You should measure how well they work.
    - MiddleEndian 8y ago
      Even if we somehow verify that reliable machines exist, how do we verify that the machines haven't been tampered with? So far we've seen all sorts of problems with the machines in practice, usually in favor of the party in power. What's our incentive to switch to machines? Speed isn't a concern here.

rhacker 8y ago

I like how flippantly disregarding the authorities are about this. Oh just make sure to sloooow down folks! No mention if the people complaining were allowed to change their votes. YET someone that is barred from voting, someone that did jail time typically, is thrown in the fucking slammer for one vote cast (and they typically didn't even know they were not allowed to).

tssva 8y ago
The machines in question display all of your selections on a separate screen for the voter to review and approve before the ballot is cast. Since the voters noticed a change they either noticed it before getting to this screen or on this screen. Either way they had an opportunity to go back and change their vote before the ballot was cast.

naikrovek 8y ago

One thing I've always wondered is why electronic voting machines aren't code reviewed AT LEAST as much as slot machines. Electronic gambling devices are intensely code reviewed. It's the law. Why not electronic voting machines? That said, paper ballots and hand counting are the answer for secure and accurate vote counts.

wlll 8y ago
> One thing I've always wondered is why electronic voting machines aren't code reviewed AT LEAST as much as slot machines. One reason could be if the people who would legislate on this benefit when voting machines don't work properly?
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  "There's no way I was legitimately voted in! Clearly the voting machines broke!"
detcader 8y ago
Use of slot machines make businesses money. Use of voting machines...
- jobigoud 8y ago
  make businesses money?
jbigelow76 8y ago
Regulations seem to me like they are always reactionary to bad shit happening, we're just too dumb to be prescient enough to get ahead of the problems because we are too arrogant to think we'll make the same mistakes we always make and because we think our intentions are insurance against those mistakes if they do happen.
- janekm 8y ago
  One problem with voting machines is that "bad stuff happening" can be beneficial to the people in charge of overseeing them, quite the opposite of gambling machines.

CivBase 8y ago

Has anyone here worked on developing a voting machine? Why is this such a complicated problem? There doesn't seem to be any many issues to consider when designing the interface, logic, and storage for one of these machines. I feel like many programmers could develop something like this in a matter of hours. I can imagine some issues if you try to introduce networking, but I don't see any reason why networking should be necessary. Just keep it simple. Many people advocate for paper and pencil because of it's simplicity, but it should be obvious why that is potentially a much more complicated solution. It relies on humans to record and later read a large amount of information delivered in small chunks. Humans are terrible at that! Getting a machine to read data from the printed page hardly seems any more trivial. That's not even to mention the potential issues that arise from managing the large amount of physical voting cards. If anyone has worked on one of these machines, I'd be very interested to hear their thoughts on the matter.

saidajigumi 8y ago
> Why is this such a complicated problem? Because a software/hardware solution is inherently inscrutable to the overwhelming majority of the population. It's amenable to hacking and not amenable to auditing. The problem is NOT "build a zero-stakes voting web app", it's more like "build a voting machine which ensures the voter can audit their vote and election auditors can audit election tallies with full transparency, and with a threat model of people trying to hack the voting machines to control election results". Getting better than pencil, scannable paper ballots, and auditors from all (political) parties involved in that election to cover vote counting / recounts –– that's the really, really hard part.
- CivBase 8y ago
  Are you saying it's a public consciousness thing, then? When I vote, it is my understanding that when I stuff my paper ballot into the box (or sometimes even just hand it over to someone), I am forced to trust the staff to account for my vote. Personally, I don't feel like I'm any more protected against bad actors by using pencil-and-paper. The only truly-auditable solution I can think of is to have everyone make their vote public, but that is obviously not a reasonable solution.

poulsbohemian 8y ago

Voting by mail, as we have in Washington and Oregon, makes it so easy to vote. And, now we don't even need a stamp on our ballots. I don't know that any system is perfect, but one really has no excuse to not vote and to vote accurately when they have plenty of time and can do it from the comfort of their home.

greiskul 8y ago
Voting by mail is an abomination that goes entirely against the idea of a secret ballot, allowing voter coercion, and sometimes even voting fraud. There is a reason most democracies don't do it.
- poulsbohemian 8y ago
  We have loads of disenfranchised people, deliberately put in that spot by manipulative voter ID policies, along with report after report about security flaws in voting machines. Tell me again what’s wrong with voting by mail?

mikeash 8y ago

Essentially every computer expert says that using computers for voting is a really bad idea. We do it anyway. Is there any other area where we do something like this?

paulhebert 8y ago
Off the top of my head, people regularly ignore environmental scientists on environmental policy and doctors on personal health habits.
scottmf 8y ago
It’s like this in many other areas including healthcare access/cost, environmental policy, drug policy, etc.

fromthestart 8y ago

This is so ridiculous. What kind of ancient hardware are these garbage machines running that they have race conditions with such large time windows? How is it possible that in 2018 our electronic voting systems are so broken? Is it really so difficult to build a basic UI and tally choices securely?

newnewpdro 8y ago

When your implementation is indefensible, always blame the user.

int_19h 8y ago

We need a federal law that outright bans voting machines for all federal elections that Congress has control over (it'll get rid of them entirely in practice, because no-one will want to waste time and money by maintaining parallel systems). That will solve all the immediate issues. Think of it as the equivalent of taking down a compromised server. Then, companies that make those things can go back to the drawing table, actually think about what they're making this time, and try to convince us all that they did it right. It'll take a lot of convincing, and that's exactly how it should be. For starters, I'd want to hear about the exact problem being solved. What would it take to make this happen? It feels like something that would carry more weight if the initial push came from the IT industry. People will listen better to something like, "I'm a software engineer with 20 years of experience, and in my educated opinion, electronic voting should be banned."

dawnerd 8y ago
All states should do what Oregon does (with optional paper ballet on election day). Opt everyone in when you get an id, none of this register to vote nonsense. Send everyone a ballet in the mail and do mail in or drop off ballots. I really don't get why it's so hard for more people to get behind, other than the whole, trying to prevent certain groups from voting.
tomohawk 8y ago
Make it a federal crime for voting machines to be inaccurate and allow civil lawsuits about same. Budget a mandatory spend to investigate a randomly selected number of precincts after each election. A main problem with voting machines is that they are a form of outsourcing of a government function which is critical to our society and our form of government. If we are to have machines, those producing them must be held accountable.
- philwelch 8y ago
  There's even an existing mechanism for this. Just like with buildings and bridges and the like, any voting machine could have a publicly registered design formally signed and sealed by a licensed Professional Engineer who is willing to accept criminal liability for any faults in the design.

mrfusion 8y ago

I’ve always wanted a button to vote a straight anti-incumbent ticket. Or at least I think they should display incumbent status on the ballot. That seems more important than party to me.

rrix2 8y ago

"I have to admit it's behaving rather erratically" https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/comic/page/42 https://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/cat/comic/page/42 (November 2005)

SeanBoocock 8y ago

I live in Austin and have been voting with these machines for the last 8 years, including earlier this week. The UI for the ballot is a series of rectangular tiles separated into two columns on a series of pages. Each tile represents a given race or proposition, with a title header, a description field, and then the various options to vote for stacked vertically as a collection of { radio button, option title }. In order to navigate between pages, there are two digital "arrow" buttons for "Next" and "Back". To navigate within a page, and then within a tile, there is a clicky scroll wheel (rotation quantized in something on the order of 30 degree increments). To make a selection there is a separate button digital button "Enter". The way the straight party selection is presented is as the first tile on the first page of partisan ballot options. Selecting straight party isn't a separate option on the underlying ballot; rather it is UI layer feature that fills in all of the partisan election options with the party of choice as if you had individually selected all of them. I've never experienced the phenomenon described in the article, but I can imagine how it might happen. There is visible latency in interactions (selecting an option, moving between options/pages) and I could imagine someone selecting the straight party choice, pressing "Enter", not seeing an immediate result and pressing Enter again while rotating the wheel, and then being confused when they see the first partisan election race not reflecting their vote because they inadvertently made another selection on that race. This seems like an easy thing to address and something that could/should have come up in UX usability testing. If anything should go through rigorous accessibility and usability testing, it should be voting processes (and that hold for whether elections are mediated by machines, paper ballots, or some other method).

Izkata 8y ago
Based on the "wait for all candidates to have loaded" description, I had a thought that no one else seems to have had yet, and you may be able to confirm it as a possibility: Do the names ever shift around? The thought is, lets say there's 3 candidates, Alex, Becky, and Carl, and they're supposed to show in that order. But due to the slow loading time, you first see Becky and Carl, then Alex loads in a moment later and the other two shift down. Since you've described the straight party selection as a separate button/option, the thought I had was, what if picking that is supposed to choose Becky, so Option 2. But if you hit it too soon, you've selected Becky as Option 1. And then Alex loads in and Becky becomes Option 2, but the vote didn't shift - it's still on Option 1. Does that sound like a possibility, with your experience with these machines?

rgejman 8y ago

This is a forum populated with thousands of smart and talented engineers all discussing the absurdity of US voting systems and suggesting great fixes. There is clearly a problem to be solved here—and it might even be lucrative to solve it. Seems like a reasonable idea for a startup company: making cheap, audit-able polling devices that can be sold to any county in the country and any country in the world. Someone here should take a stab at it.

jacques_chester 8y ago
Or, as engineers, we can propose an existing solution that is trustworthy and well-proved: pen and paper. It has proved its reliability in thousands of elections. It is cheap, universally-understood and basically impossible to subvert to a meaningful level of impact. It is understood by everyone who can vote. Democracy doesn't need us to show off how clever and creative we are. It needs boring, simple, reliable mechanisms.

pinwheel 8y ago

It seems the system could be configured to default to 'no selection' rather than default to one choice or another. Then the 'page rendering' issue can be absolved of artificial influence perceived or otherwise.

samat 8y ago

They are basically admitting it’s faulty when telling ‘it’s users mistake and there are lots of users like this’.