35 ms·

Reddit user captures video of 2012 voting machines altering votes

1072 points by jipumarino 14y ago

tokenadult 14y ago
The system here in Minnesota works much better. All ballots are paper ballots that are indelibly marked by voters. My wife and I voted this morning in our busy precinct in Minnesota, where there are some tight statewide contests about constitutional amendments and perhaps the most contested race for our state's House of Representatives of any electoral district in our state. As usual, we voted by marking bubble-shaped spaces on a paper ballot with a black pen. That provides an excellent audit trail for the voting. Machines can count such paper ballots very rapidly, and they are user-friendly for voters, and there is little ambiguity about how to vote. Minnesota has had ballots like this for at least a decade. But even at that, when a state has a razor-thin margin in an election, it can be maddening to figure out what happened. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/11/franken-coleman.html http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/11/franken-c... http://www.factcheck.org/elections/mining_the_minnesota_recount.html http://www.factcheck.org/elections/mining_the_minnesota_reco... The election to the United States Senate from Minnesota in 2008 was too close to call before the election, and even after millions of Minnesotans voted for one of three major party candidates, the margin between the top two candidates, Democrat Al Franken and Republican Norm Coleman, was so close that the margin was only one-hundredth of 1 percent of the votes cast in the election. That election really underscored the slogan "every vote counts." It's quite indefensible to use a voting system that doesn't leave a literal paper trail. The technology is well proven. But what really gives most election results legitimacy and staying power is a wide enough margin among votes cast by people who show up to vote that the old saying "Vox populi, vox Dei" can apply to the result. The people speak, and even the voters who didn't agree with the plurality have to listen. It's appalling that any state would have a voting system that could obscure what the consensus of the voters is. AFTER EDIT: Thanks for the several replies to this comment. Reading other replies posted to this thread since I first wrote this comment, I see several mentions of the systems in the Pacific Northwest states of having mail ballots mailed to voters. When I lived in Taiwan, more than a decade ago, I had a post office box there. Sometimes I would receive postal mail from the United States for the previous holders of that post office box, including State of Oregon ballots for two different Oregon voters (who were presumably each other's roommates while living in Taiwan). I always wondered, without giving into the temptation, whether I could have successfully filled out one (or both?) of those ballots and mailed them back from Taiwan to cast votes in an Oregon election. By contrast, I was never able to cast a Minnesota absentee ballot from Taiwan, even the time when I should have been regarded as having a stable permanent residence address here in the United States. So I missed out on voting in both the 1984 election and the ever-so-controversial election of 2000. I have no clear awareness of how mail ballots are authenticated as having been mailed by the voter to whom they belong (a signature on the envelope?) and hope that someone is checking to prevent those ballots from being misused.
- amalag 14y ago
  Virginia does this as well. I think it's a great system. No need for costly machines, just optical scanners which can be spot checked by pulling a percentage to verify. Plus you can scale it very easily, just add more people for ID checking and more spaces to sit and fill in the boxes. Virginia has both right now and a lot of people prefer to wait for the machine. I would love for them to switch completely to the paper marked ballots.
  - dripton 14y ago
    We used to only have the optical scanners in Virginia. The machines are a recent addition, and a big step back. I want them gone.
- digikata 14y ago
  Yes, my county in California does this as well. A voter verifiable paper trail should be a requirement for voting systems - either as an optically read input, or a voter verifiable paper output placed into a ballot box as an audit check against the electronic results.
- MartinCron 14y ago
  Bringing up the Coleman/Franken election reminds me of my particular pet peeve. When the margin of victory is less than the margin of error, it's impossible to know the will of the people. One hundredth of one percent is not within any reasonable margin of error.
  - danielweber 14y ago
    Yeah, we aren't willing to admit it, but every voting system has a margin of error. Even 1 in a thousand voters will have problems with completely unambiguous questions.
  - Symmetry 14y ago
    In the end, if one candidate got 100,000 votes and the other got 100,001 then to the extent that we randomly select between the two I'm not sure that it really makes a difference which one wins. In this case the will of the people is that the two candidates are equally good. "The greatest value of free elections is in all of the out-of-equilibrium outcomes that, because of the regularity of free elections, never come close to happening."
tcohen 14y ago
confirmed by NBC http://on.msnbc.com/TIyxAl http://on.msnbc.com/TIyxAl
wbrendel 14y ago
What's wrong with paper ballots again? Serious question. In my area (northern MA), voters are given a ballot with a bubble next to each of the candidates' names. You use a marker to fill in the bubble next to the candidate you want to vote for, like 6-year-olds manage to do all the time on multiple choice tests in school. Then it gets read in by a machine, leaving a paper trail just in case. How are these electronic voting machines any better than that? With all the technical/fraud issues surrounding them, wouldn't it make sense to just use paper?
- DirtyCalvinist 14y ago
  Electronic voting machines allow for easier customization of text for edge cases, like a need for higher contrast, larger print or another language. A good compromise, I think, would be to have the electronic machines print out a human-readable paper ballot, and that would be counted as ballots used to be. The security/checkability of the old system with the convenience of the electronic interface.
  - wbrendel 14y ago
    Those are good arguments, but are those benefits worth the millions of dollars we spend on these obviously flawed machines? It seems like overkill. Print some ballots with larger print and some in whatever languages are common in your area. If we do have to use electronic voting machines, I like your idea of it printing a paper ballot rather than tabulating the vote inside the machine.
    - trhtrsh 14y ago
      Millions of dollars is cheap for a properly conducted vote.
- danielweber 14y ago
  How do you count a smudge instead of a complete filling-in of the oval? You have humans go over them, and people hate that. Just because you never see this issue doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It's just that the ambiguous ballots don't matter in the vast majority of elections so no one cares. I'm not saying computers are better than paper. They each have trade-offs.
hcarvalhoalves 14y ago
I wouldn't attribute to malice what can be explained by a faulty touch screen. These incidents hurt the trust on the election process, though. The machines used on Brazillian elections are simpler but much better thought out, since it's impossible to input the wrong candidate. You have to input the number of the candidate, review his information and photo, then press "confirm" button. It doesn't present a list of candidates to choose from, so there are no biases. The US should adopt a similar machine. [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Brazil#The_Brazilian_voting_machines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Brazil#The_Brazili...
jackalope 14y ago
Obviously staged, obviously edited, obviously fake.
- binaryorganic 14y ago
  I'll give you obviously edited, but why so sure about the other two?
  - bradmccarty 14y ago
    I can't even give obviously edited. Ever used a lower-end Android phone? I have, and this looks like a video directly from one. Jittery, frame skipping mess. Edit: Also, it's been verified and taken offline. http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/11/06/machine-turns-vote-for-obama-into-one-for-romney/ http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/11/06/machine-turns-vote-for-obama-...
    - binaryorganic 14y ago
      Obviously edited b/c of the distinct scene cut between the candidate selection that takes up the first half of the video, and the cast vote button which takes up the second half. All the commenter was saying was that whoever shot the video didn't share it before first splicing two different shots together.
      - MichaelApproved 14y ago
        "All the commenter was saying was that whoever shot the video didn't share it before first splicing two different shots together." That's not all the commenter was saying. OP was claiming the original video was staged and fake. He was accusing the Redditor if deception.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- clebio 14y ago
  Evidence, citations? Not at all obvious. On the surface, looks quite real. And I've had enough touch-screen devices to know that mis-calibration is common, so it's plausible.
salman89 14y ago
Voting machines need to be a lot better than this or not exist at all, but does anyone actually think that IF this machine was altering votes, it would alter it in this fashion with a UI element tied to the alteration? Seems more like a crappy touch screen.
- jneal 14y ago
  This was my thought exactly. If someone was going through the trouble of altering votes, it would make no sense to make note of this within UI elements, it could just as easily "secretly" change the votes for 1/8 (just my theoretical magical number) voters and alter the results just enough without being noticeable.
  - Nursie 14y ago
    I wonder though... maybe the inconvenience would be enough to either change a percentage of votes or make a few people give up. Looks like a bug, actually swings a close election?
  - weaksauce 14y ago
    from the article (emphasis mine): > I initially selected Obama but Romney was highlighted. I assumed it was being picky so I deselected Romney and tried Obama again, this time more carefully, and still got Romney. Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney’s name and started tapping very closely together to find the ‘active areas’. From the top of Romney’s button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama’s name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein’s button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.
  - swang 14y ago
    Except this just frustrates the voter and maybe he doesn't bother voting for Obama at all. There's no accusation of "altering" the votes because how do you track, "Touchscreen didn't select Obama, voter just gave up?"
morsch 14y ago
The shenanigans you seem to tolerate during elections are just incomprehensible to us foreigners. The number of horror stories I've heard in the last couple of weeks regarding everything from just weirdness of the system to blatant manipulation is farcical. It's possible that I'm getting a bleaker picture than reality, I suppose, since I only read about the broken stuff and not the instances where everything just works.
- veridies 14y ago
  For the most part, things aren't as bad as they seem. It's a huge country and any oddities gain a great deal of traction. Most votes go simply and smoothly. That being said, I'm taking a two hour drive later today to vote because my vote-by-mail ballot never arrived, so...
- MartinCron 14y ago
  It's possible that I'm getting a bleaker picture than reality, I suppose, since I only read about the broken stuff and not the instances where everything just works. You only hear about the ballots that crash, not the millions that land safely every election.
- pnathan 14y ago
  (1) We have > 300 M people. That's a huge population. (2) We are OK publicizing it. (3) Probability would indicate that we'll have a certain error, and it'll be shouted about. --- But it's very strange that it was "miscalibrated" to not select one particular candidate, no? :)
  - 3JPLW 14y ago
    Selection bias, perhaps. Sure, there will be a small amount of miscalibrated machines. And a smaller amount will happen to be miscalibrated to select the wrong candidate. But you'll only ever hear about those latter cases. The others will be caught and corrected without internet vitriol.
  - mindstab 14y ago
    > We have > 300 M people. That's a huge population Um, unless you're talking to India which manages to pull off votes with 1.2 Billion People. You are like 25% their population.
gte910h 14y ago
I hope this is a hoax.
- dave1619 14y ago
  Yeah, all it will take is a few more users taking videos from their phones of a similar thing happening, and then this things goes ballistic... especially if some people can't select Obama and Obama loses.
  - jff 14y ago
    What about the other reports that mention votes for Romney being changed to Obama? It's just that "votes get switched to Romney" will make the Internet go ballistic--it's still a problem either way.
- georgemcbay 14y ago
  I hope it is a hoax or a miscalculation issue. If it is actual fraud, I hope the people behind it are found, tried and if convicted punished to a degree warranted by what this would be -- treason.
  - gte910h 14y ago
    While I emotionally agree with you, I think overcharging is a bane on the existence of the legal system.
ditoa 14y ago
Looks like a calibration issue. They should have included selecting other candidates in the list. While not good enough (voting machines should be "perfect") calling it "altering votes" is a little much. It shows you that it has registered the wrong candidate, I would call this incorrectly registering input.
- bibinou 14y ago
  > I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine.
  - ceejayoz 14y ago
    If true, why not include that in the video?
    - danielweber 14y ago
      Charitably, because they were sneaking it. Recording devices are not allowed in many (most?) states, precisely because it lets people sell votes. And although I think this is overblown, in general I think this seems a legit reason to sneak a recording.
  - danielweber 14y ago
    If people have been pressing that "Obama" screen region all day, it could well be worn out. I wonder what the trade-offs are for randomizing each ballot.
- hornbaker 14y ago
  Did you read the article? "I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney’s name and started tapping very closely together to find the ‘active areas’. From the top of Romney’s button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama’s name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein’s button was fine. All other buttons worked fine."
WrkInProgress 14y ago
I wish they had also taken video of them selecting Jill Stein to see if the entire machine was calibrated incorrectly or just the Romney/Obama section.
ceejayoz 14y ago
Everyone's been spoiled by iPads etc., I guess. Old touch screens used to do this all the time. My Palm Pilot had a calibration app I'd have to run every few days/weeks. If he'd hit Mitt Romney, it probably wouldn't have selected Romney but the blank region above his name.
- newsoundwave 14y ago
  He mentions in the description for the video hitting Jill Stein selects Jill Stein. He was eventually able to vote by hitting a very small area between Obama and Jill Stein.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  > If he'd hit Mitt Romney, it probably wouldn't have selected Romney but the blank region above his name. Wrong: > Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney's name and started tapping very closely together to find the 'active areas'. From the top of Romney's button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama's name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein's button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.
- mmanfrin 14y ago
  > I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine.
- sixothree 14y ago
  He describes in his comments how he touched numerous points down each of the candidates and all points registered for the correct candidate except for Obama. That makes it not sound like a calibration error to me.
- hnriot 14y ago
  It's so funny to see that hardly anyone actually did anything more than just watch the video. The same "oh it must have been miscalibrated" is repeated up and down the comment page. Let's hope whomever gets elected spends money on education so that people start reading again and not just consuming the 5 second Reader's Digest version.
ambiguator 14y ago
Seems like the obvious solution would be to close off the broken voting machine.
- MartinCron 14y ago
  I got really into playing pinball a few years ago, and I got into the habit of turning of a pinball machine whenever it wasn't working correctly (mis-aligned flippers, whatever) so that other people didn't waste their quarters. Yes, it was kind of obnoxious. Sorry. Anyway, a similar mechanism to say "hey, this voting machine might be screwed up, somebody check it out ASAP!" would make a lot of sense.
BlackNapoleon 14y ago
I saw this earlier and I noted that news agencies seemed to be reluctant to post it. CNN has been on this from the jump. I think people are afraid of it being revealed as a fake. There is some serious validation that needs to occur if this is the case.
cwe 14y ago
NBC News confirming they've removed this particular machine because of this: http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/11/06/machine-turns-vote-for-obama-into-one-for-romney/ http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/11/06/machine-turns-vote-for-obama-...
- danielweber 14y ago
  Which is proper. The report that the volunteer said "everything will be okay" is the worst part of this. Systems need to recognize and isolate damage, not assume it will never occur.
  - trhtrsh 14y ago
    Really, intentionally disregarding a broken machine is felony election tampering. We shouldn't have bored old ladies running precincts, we should cough up for paid, trained professionals.
llambda 14y ago
What I've read[1][2] in regard to this incident is that it is most likely a calibration issue: i.e. the touch screen is improperly calibrated and as a result is not selecting the proper region of the screen. Now this is concerning because it likely means other machines could be or are miscalibrated. However the important takeaway here is that this is not some malicious attempt to rig the vote. If that were the case the likely method would be completely invisible from the UI; why would an attacker bother to actually show a user they were being manipulated? Of course, they wouldn't. [1] Joseph Hall comments here, also provides a link to further commentary by him: http://gawker.com/5958114/an-expert-weighs-in-on-that-viral-reddit-voter-fraud-video http://gawker.com/5958114/an-expert-weighs-in-on-that-viral-... [2] http://www.theawl.com/2012/11/the-truth-about-voting-machines http://www.theawl.com/2012/11/the-truth-about-voting-machine...
- ljoshua 14y ago
  Yes, very likely a calibration issue. There was a similar instance occurring here in Colorado [1], but in the opposite direction (a vote for Romney went in as Obama). The machines definitely need to get better, but it is probably not fraud or a hack of any sort. [1] http://www.chieftain.com/politics/pueblo-county-voting-machines-being-tested-state-audit-failing-to/article_60337fae-2783-11e2-9e19-001a4bcf887a.html http://www.chieftain.com/politics/pueblo-county-voting-machi...
- Anjin 14y ago
  Unfortunately no, if you read what he wrote in the comments of that submission: Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney's name and started tapping very closely together to find the 'active areas'. From the top of Romney's button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama's name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein's button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.
  - 14y ago
pebb 14y ago
He who casts a vote decides nothing. He who counts the votes decides everything
shitlord 14y ago
Is it too much to ask to just completely open-source these voting machine? These machines decide the future of our country and affect the entire world. The least we could do is allow everyone to verify for themselves whether the machines are secure.
- danielweber 14y ago
  Make sure you open-source the compiler, the firmware, the hardware manufacturing process, the assembly, the drivers, the software that built the compiler, and the software that built the compiler that built the compiler. Or just operate under the assumption that some of the machines are compromised and make sure you have ways of recognizing faults after-the-fact.
  - verbatim 14y ago
    You say this in a way that implies that it's not feasible to do such a thing. I'm pretty sure that all of those components have been open sourced in various projects, just maybe not all in the same system.
elbac 14y ago
How to Rig an Election: The G.O.P. aims to paint the country red http://harpers.org/archive/2012/11/how-to-rig-an-election/?single=1 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/11/how-to-rig-an-election/?s...
btilly 14y ago
There have been problems like this in every election with these machines. More troubling, exit polls and voting results have routinely disagreed with each other since 2000. In most countries that would be taken as proof that the election was not fair. But not in the USA! http://www.ukprogressive.co.uk/breaking-retired-nsa-analyst-proves-gop-is-stealing-elections/article20598.html http://www.ukprogressive.co.uk/breaking-retired-nsa-analyst-... claims evidence of systemic manipulation of the vote, with the trend strongly being in the GOP's favor. I have not personally verified, but it would not surprise me. Anyone who has been paying attention this election cycle knows about the attempts by both sides to manipulate rules about who can vote, when, in ways that advantage themselves and disadvantage each other. That happens in a lot of elections but not to the extent of this one. With weird results such as, because of a recent law in Ohio, polling workers have to ASK for ID, but due to a court decision, they can't stop you from voting if you DON'T have that ID. (Confused polling workers are sure to get this wrong.) The general trend is that Republicans want as many barriers to voting in person as possible, while Democrats want as many to be able to vote as possible. That is because more marginal voters are much more likely to be Democrat than the general population. The stated reason is "to prevent fraud" even though there is very little evidence of such fraud in practice. On mail-in ballots this reverses, since the GOP expects a large portion of mail-in ballots to be from military people who are likely to vote Republican. Fraud has been more of an issue with mail-in ballots, but obviously people are not as worried about that. Laws get broken as well. For instance the 2000 election was decided in Florida, in part due to a voter purge that the courts decided was illegal. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Central_Voter_File http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Central_Voter_File for verification of that. The lesson learned is that voter purges work, which is why Florida was trying to do a purge this year at the last minute despite being warned that it was illegal. Because flipping the choice for President was easily worth the slap on the wrist they got afterwards. There already have been laws broken this year (see http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57535950/man-charged-after-tossing-voter-registration-forms-in-virginia/ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57535950/man-charged-aft... and http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/national/fbi-launches-investigation-into-fraudulent-florida-voter-letters/1258211 http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/national/fbi-launches-... for example), and everyone expects the lawyers to be gainfully employed as a result. In short, get out your popcorn. When we exercise our right to vote, the vested interests exercise what they see as their right to manipulate the vote, and this time there is a decent chance of fireworks.
cloudwalking 14y ago
I am a red-blooded technologist, but I think voting should be done on paper ballots. Call me a luddite, but it's just too easy to manipulate votes--either at the time of voting or in post-processing--with an electronic voting machine. That being said, the only conceivable way to have a secure electronic voting process is to use a completely open source system. Open source hardware and software, with publicly viewable results.
- cpeterso 14y ago
  What problem do electronic voting machines actually solve? The US didn't seem to have problems counting millions of paper ballots (save for some hanging chads) until the "solution" of electronic voting machines appeared.
  - michaelt 14y ago
    As I understand it the intention is to solve: 1. Allowing people with disabilities to vote. For example, headphone voice prompts for blind people, large print/high contrast for the elderly etc. 2. Making sure voters understand the voting procedure - particularly if there are multiple offices and issues on the ballot, multiple ballot papers and so on. 3. Ensuring voters' intent is recorded unambiguously. For example, you can't put marks in multiple boxes (intentionally or accidentally) and you can't leave a dimpled or hanging chad. 4. Perfect counting (assuming the data is entered correctly and the software works right) as opposed to manual counts where papers sometimes end up in the wrong pile. 5. You can offer voting in multiple languages. 6. You can randomise the order of candidates on the ballot, to evenly distribute any impact being at the top might have. 7. Ability to take backups for transit or deliver results electronically, avoiding boxes of ballots going missing. 8. Reduced counting costs and faster results, allowing more polling stations to be operated and allowing the polls to stay open later for the same result delivery deadline. Whether it succeeds at offering these benefits, and whether they're worth the obvious cost in trust is debatable.
- danielweber 14y ago
  If your plan to secure the machines is to have the source be open, you have already failed. You need a system that works well even if the source has been altered. Paper ballots have issues, too. They are different issues, and largely unseen by the general public until you have a really close election and have to use human judgment to decide whether that mark counts as a vote or not.
anonymouz 14y ago
Even if this is just accidental or some weird calibration issue (weird, because it only seems to affect one button according to the report), it just goes to show how little confidence one can have in these machines. Does anyone think if they can't get the touchscreen right, the remaining parts of the system can be expected to work correctly? The only positive thing is that such an easy to demonstrate failure might open the eyes of the less technically educated parts of the public to how bad an idea it is to use electronic voting machines. Any suggested replacement of paper ballots comes with such a huge bag of problems (sometimes inherent in the method, and not merely problems of the implementation), and so few advantages that it puzzles me why anyone would want to introduce them.
- ricardobeat 14y ago
  The fact that the current implementation is not reliable doesn't make the whole idea of electronic voting bad. We've had electronic voting for general elections in Brazil since 2000, with very few accusations of fraud.
  - anonymouz 14y ago
    But there are very significant issues with the principle of electronic voting: Ideally, every voter would be able to verify their own vote after the fact via some cryptographic mechanism. But on the other hand, this mechanism should be such that the government (or another individual trying to coerce our voter) would not be able to verify the vote -- an almost contradictory, difficult requirement. I am not aware of such a method being employed in any large-scale election. In the absence of such a method, you have a heap of problems: 1) How do you make it verifiable for the general public? Even if you accept that the general public will not be able to verify it (bad!), how would you make it verifiable even for experts? It's almost impossible to ensure that the code being run is the one you verified beforehand, especially on such a large scale, so this way is out of the question. (Remember, this is a high-stakes game, so you'd better know that your CPU in fact executes your opcodes correctly...) 2) Electronic voting & tallying opens the door for large-scale manipulation without leaving traces. If you want to remove 10000 paper ballots, you have to somehow get rid of them (with people watching). 10000 votes vanishing in a computer? No problem, just a memory operation, a bystander would never notice it. Some of this can be dealt with by having the machine print out a paper ballot immediately after voting, and keeping those ballots. Then you're in fact using the relative safety of paper ballot voting to double check the electronic record.
ricardobeat 14y ago
I can't fathom why would you even choose touchscreens for voting machines. It's a simple interface, mechanical buttons are much better. They are more durable, offer tactile feedback and can be used by people with visual impairment.
forgingahead 14y ago
This happened earlier as well during the early voting period (though Romney votes were being switched for Obama -- funny how one got coverage whilst the other didn't). It's not some conspiracy, just a calibration error. Source: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/03/Electronic-Voting-Machines-In-Battleground-States-Switching-Romney-Votes-For-Obama http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/03/Electroni...
- forgingahead 14y ago
  Google cache since Breitbart is getting hammered: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.breitbart.com%2FBig-Government%2F2012%2F11%2F03%2FElectronic-Voting-Machines-In-Battleground-States-Switching-Romney-Votes-For-Obama&rlz=1C1CHFA_enUS485US486&oq=cache%3Awww.breitbart.com%2FBig-Government%2F2012%2F11%2F03%2FElectronic-Voting-Machines-In-Battleground-States-Switching-Romney-Votes-For-Obama&sugexp=chrome,mod=0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.b...
- zero_intp 14y ago
  oddly, breitbart is perhaps one of the least reputable media sources on the internet these days. They are great if you are looking for biased, unfounded, or fraudulent "facts" to support an extractive wealth policy that exploits "undesirables"
armored_mammal 14y ago
Is there any evidence that what it records actually matches the screen anyway?
- danielweber 14y ago
  There is a user-visible printed receipt that is not shown in the video.
wallacrw 14y ago
Is it real, and Republicans are fraudsters? Or is it a fake, and Democrats are fraudsters? Or is a Republican plant of a fake so that I believe I hate Democrats?!? Or maybe even Democrats planted an obvious fake, to make me think Republicans posted the fake, so that I'd know it's fake and end up disrespecting Republicans for the poor attempt at influencing me?!?!?! Too confusing. I'm staying home.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
donerKebab 14y ago
Why does this matter? The majority of votes is not the decider in this 'democracy'.
bryanh 14y ago
Looks like a touch screen that isn't calibrated correctly.
- astrodust 14y ago
  It's 2012. You can buy touch screens that don't need constant "calibration". These machines are using 1980s caliber technology when this was a constant problem. The last touch screen I've worked with that had this issue was CRT-based. All these machines should do, presuming you need machines at all, is print out a receipt with the vote clearly indicated so that it can be deposited in a traditional ballot box. Leaving the tabulation a "trade secret" is really not a good idea.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
kevinalexbrown 14y ago
If there were one aspect of electronic voting I could change it would be the following: allow electronic votes to be reviewed by each individual at a later date, from two independent organizations. Each vote gets sent to two independent electronic counting organizations, and each let you verify your vote after the election, with an (anonymous) confirmation number issued at voting time. If enough people cry foul to rule out a large group collectively lying or forgetting their confirmation numbers, fraud would be much easier to establish and localize. Moreover, requiring each independent database of votes to match to within some margin would also decrease the likelihood of fraud by requiring collusion between both organizations. EDIT: Note that the confirmation number would be issued to you anonymously and sans receipt - there would be no way to prove your vote - you could have found some random confirmation number, and no recourse for a single citizen crying foul. The point, rather, is that if several hundred or thousand individuals noticed that their vote seemed to have changed, the likelihood that they were all making it up or forgetting their confirmation numbers would decrease substantially.
- eli 14y ago
  Definitely not! It's a secret ballot -- you cannot have any way to prove which candidates you voted for.
  - goostavos 14y ago
    I was not the best civics student.. What is the significance of it being secret? Being able to verify your vote seems like a pretty simple, good thing ( I would think ).
    - tobias3 14y ago
      Someone can give you money to vote for a specific candidate and verify that you voted correctly via the confirmation code.
    - ry0ohki 14y ago
      So say if some party were to gain power and start harassing people that voted for the other party...
tucosan 14y ago
For those who are able to understand german and are not from the US, i highly recommend the newest alternativlos podcast for perspective: http://alternativlos.org/28/ http://alternativlos.org/28/
onli 14y ago
What do you expect? Opaque source-code, machines produced by companies linked to the Republicans, and all that in a failing state. Stuff like that was obviously going to happen.
mkhpalm 14y ago
Jeez, I thought HN people were sharper than this about modern technology. I'm not a Romney supporter but these voting machines are basic single touch interfaces with standard fat-finger algorithms. Lets have him pull back on the camera and show the rest of the screen. Specifically, where his other finger is at the time it selects Romney. His video is highly suspect to me.
sukuriant 14y ago
What show was it that discussed what would happen with a large number of very smart engineers and voting? I recall a TV show back in the day that basically said "We don't use electronic voting because it's too easy to game". I think it was one of the episodes of Sliders.
realrocker 14y ago
Calibration!! Really?? Any software/hardware developer here worth his/her salt would agree that can't be it. Let's see what could have happened: 1) The Y axis of the screen was maladjusted 2) Touch Sensitivity of the screen was reduced due to incorrect settings 3) Touch area had hair/dust/oil on it. But if you read the voter's story it happened only for Obama's field. Don't they have independent watchdogs looking after this thing in United States? If shit like this went down in India, the Election Commission would have simply closed the whole damn polling booth(for the day) and arrange separate polling on a later day with extra scrutiny and security.
- evan_ 14y ago
  > But if you read the voter's story it happened only for Obama's field. Easy explanation- the voter was lying.
- stevenwei 14y ago
  Disagree. I've worked with resistive/infrared touchscreens for many years and this behavior is entirely consistent with touchscreen calibration errors, especially with cheap/crappy touchscreens. See my other comments here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4752605 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4752605
beatpanda 14y ago
This is just the tip of the iceberg, folks. If you're in the U.S. I highly reccomend being a poll worker in a contentious district in a swing state if you ever get the chance. I was in a suburb of Denver last election and saw all kinds of shenanigans, from people pulling fire alarms to clear out the polling places to people walking aaround with laptops "checking voter registration" (actually just lying to people to get them to go home). There was also this, a few weeks ago: http://www.nationalmemo.com/man-connected-to-virginia-gop-arrested-for-destroying-voter-registration-forms/ http://www.nationalmemo.com/man-connected-to-virginia-gop-ar... The fact is that there is a concerted, coordinated effort to tamper with the vote every single election. I have no way of knowing whether this specific incident was malicious, but I sure wouldn't be surprised if it was.
- indiecore 14y ago
  Isn't denying someone the right to vote a crime?
  - beatpanda 14y ago
    Oh, absolutely. But whether these things get prosecuted is a highly partisan affair.
  - bobwaycott 14y ago
    Not only that, but it is grounds to apply Section 2 of the 14th Amendment. Not many people seem to be aware of the second clause. Basically, it says that any state found to be denying citizens their vote will have their representation in Congress proportionately decreased in accordance with how many people were denied their voting right. All this nonsense about voter IDs, altering votes, making it difficult for people to vote in contentious areas (e.g., the Florida districts who have already filed suits in the last couple days) and the like should really be handled by applying the 14th Amendment. Or at least by the executive making a clear statement that it will do so. Any attempt to disenfranchise people should be met with Section 2.
    - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
maurits 14y ago
Can someone explain me like a five year old (european) how it is that... You put a man on the moon, flew the space shuttle, have a rover sending holiday pics from mars, not to mention, your entire computer industrie.... But you can not make or agree a voting machine that actually works beyond reasonable doubt?!
- gte910h 14y ago
  The issue is that we have several voting machines that DO work. They're just not what certain states bought. Were these bought for nefarious reasons? Perhaps. Are they bad even if they were just purchased due to incompetence/graft? Yes.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
melkisch 14y ago
If you don't want to have your vote altered. You can go on https://poutsch.com https://poutsch.com The cool thing is that the whole planet can vote there!
jordanthoms 14y ago
Simpsons did it... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBaX9GPSaQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBaX9GPSaQ
raverbashing 14y ago
Obligatory reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBaX9GPSaQ#t=18s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBaX9GPSaQ#t=18s I was surprised to see how similar it was.
ommunist 14y ago
Oh, how sad the vigilante cannot film the pesky RAM-inhabiting daemon, that summate counting and distributes electronic votes according to the AdSense spending of every candidate. Even the iPhone is not capable of doing that surveillance.
JoeCortopassi 14y ago
I know that this will remain at the bottom of this thread, because it doesn't have enough conspiracy theory in it, but does anyone really think that this is actual vote tampering? I mean, why on earth would you tamper with a voting machine so that it stuffs the ballot, but have it update the UI so that the user can see and report the error? This should fall to the way side of failing basic logic, but it doesn't because people want a sensationalist article to argue over. Changing votes would be much easier to do on the back end, and would have the additional benefit of never being detected by the user
- VMG 14y ago
  But what is the other explanation then?
  - usaar333 14y ago
    touchscreen calibration errors or related software glitches. I've certainly seen my own phone get screwed up enough on occasion that a touch on point x registered at y.
    - takeda64 14y ago
      except the guy who recorded it claims that selecting candidate that's below Obama worked correctly.
      - usaar333 14y ago
        From my phone experiences, it isn't always a matter of a touch being shifted up/down by X everyone. Sometimes individual areas are screwed up. (as a simple experiment, I can put some water droplets on my nexus S and things go haywire unpredictably). I'm doubtful this is malicious not so much because I'm some idealist that believes voter fraud doesn't happen, but because of all ways to commit fraud, this is a but ridiculous - it's obvious to everyone the machine is recording wrong and it will be noticed.
  - m_myers 14y ago
spectrum 14y ago
In the Netherlands they got rid of voting machines all together in 2008. A group set out to ensure that the election process in the Netherlands would become as fraud resistant as it was before the advent of paperless voting computers. They demonstrated that the voting machines could be hacked. It wass also a risk because of the small group involved in getting the results out of these computers, with no real possibility to check if they are real (because the source code is not open). Committing fraud would only have to involve a few people. On May 16, 2008 the Dutch government decided that elections in the Netherlands will be held using paper ballots and red pencil only. A proposal to develop a new generation of voting computers was rejected. More info at http://wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/English http://wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/English
johncoltrane 14y ago
What exactly are supposed to be the benefits of electronic voting machines over sliping a piece of paper in an enveloppe and putting it in an urn?
scotty79 14y ago
Why not this http://www.ted.com/talks/david_bismark_e_voting_without_fraud.html http://www.ted.com/talks/david_bismark_e_voting_without_frau... ?
bratao 14y ago
Citing felipeko: Brazil actually has a very organized election. Aside from bad politicians we have to chose from, the election does not have many problems. We have a judicial system just for election (with judges and clear laws) ready to take actions (and they do take) when something goes wrong. All election occurs in one day, a sunday so everyone can vote, and the results usually come in less than 4 hours, because all vote is electronic.
blisper 14y ago
I asked for paper ballot this morning. Many volunteers are cheerful and apathetic, for them its just another gig. Lost on them is the fact this is something fundamental. Scary !!
bane 14y ago
"It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting." - Jumpers (1972)
nsxwolf 14y ago
This seems like a fairly poor way to implement voter fraud. The screen gives instant feedback. No Obama voter is going to say "Oh well, I guess I'll just cast my vote for Romney then." If you were reprogramming the machine, wouldn't you be better off changing it to show Obama had been selected on the screen, but then print Romney onto the paper ballot? There's a better chance a voter won't bother scrutinizing the printout.
afterburner 14y ago
This is serious, but I'm getting a lot of amusing out of news reporters asking questions on Reddit, and have dozens of Reddit users pipe in with jokes.
short_circut 14y ago
It seems to me a way to mitigate this risk of part of the screen not working is to randomize the order with which the candidates are displayed. The error would presumably average itself out. Either way this is unacceptable.
csmatt 14y ago
A bit off-topic, but how do recounts work with electronic voting machines?
- kbutler 14y ago
  It varies. Some systems have a "recount" button that returns the same result as before. Others have an actual paper trail that can be recounted by hand.
FrojoS 14y ago
I never understood why we would go for electronic voting. I couldn't care less about the discussion here about touch screens or GUIs. Computer should have no buisnes for important, secret elections! In my opinion the risks and downsides of moving away from pen and paper clearly outweigh any of the laughable advantages - unless of course you profit from a system that is in-transparent and manipulatable.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
ww520 14y ago
I think a system of repeatability for voting is important. Once a voter has casted a vote, his vote should be able to be repeated without change in different systems at will to verify that his vote has not been tampered. The system can work like this: - Voter is assigned a unique ID, on his voting card issued upon verifying his identity. He can pick a security pin for added security. - Voter is given a device thumb drive, RFID with some RAM, whatever storage device. - Voter goes to a machine to vote. The machine cryptographically signs the voting result with his id. The machine writes the result to his storage device, emails him a copy, and/or puts the result on a public website. The machine also sends the result to a central server for compilation. - Voter can go to any other machine on any other sites, plug in his result, his id, and his pin to see the voting result for verification. Voter can confirm by sending the result to central server. Or submit the signed result to third party website to display it for verification. - If there's any mismatch, voter raises hell and demands to invalidate old vote (after verifying his identity, id, and pin), revote, and burn the tampering machine. Edit: Id obviously means a public/private key pair.
jcmoscon 14y ago
LOL probably just needs to touch a little bit lower on the screen. If you're not smart enough to figure that out, you should NOT be allowed to vote.
ne0codex 14y ago
This seriously pisses me the fuck off. Just how the hell do we not have the technology yet for accurate touch-screen technology in voting machines?
dhughes 14y ago
Canadian here but I'm curious wouldn't it make sense for voting machines to have independent dual screens instead of a single screen where the possibility of a calibration error could exist?
tomflack 14y ago
Lower house - http://aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_Vote/Voting_HOR.htm#papers http://aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_Vote/Voting_HOR.htm#papers Senate - http://aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_Vote/Voting_Senate.htm#papers http://aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_Vote/Voting_Senate.htm#paper... This is how we vote in Australia. I have real trouble seeing any system of computerized voting or punch-card voting as superior having followed the United States' experiences. What do you guys think? We use preferential-voting, so it's a little different but the idea is solid.
satori99 14y ago
The US uses a federal agency to collect income taxes, so why won't it do the obvious thing and create one to run federal elections?
- trhtrsh 14y ago
  US does not have federal elections. US has state elections for Senate, Congress, and the Electoral College.
Xcelerate 14y ago
I'm not trying to be snarky: could someone explain to me why this is HN-worthy (or at least worth 609 points)? In an election with thousands of voting machines, the probability is high enough that at least a few of them will be defective in some way; it should be expected as far as I can tell.
- shawn-butler 14y ago
  Unsubstantiated rumors of vote tampering via technological means on election night is the ultimate link-bait? Seems pretty clear why it is worth so many points :) If only the specifications of the hardware and source for the software for the machine in question were available for us to analyze....
damncabbage 14y ago
Potential voter purging in Pennsylvania: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/11/watchdog-evidence-unlawful-voter-purge-pennsylvania http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/11/watchdog-evidence-un... Oregon worker altering ballots in the GOP's favor: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/11/06/oregon-election-worker-fired-for-altering-ballots-to-republican-straight-ticket/ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/11/06/oregon-election-worker... At least one worker taking votes and putting them under the voting box: https://twitter.com/danicamckellar/status/265907196372594688 https://twitter.com/danicamckellar/status/265907196372594688 https://twitter.com/danicamckellar/status/26590774867435110 https://twitter.com/danicamckellar/status/26590774867435110 ... What the hell is going on over there?
Gabler 14y ago
I would be more outraged if the video actually showed him tapping the other candidates to prove that they worked correctly. He says that tapping the others worked fine but there is no proof of this in the video.
- LoneWolf 14y ago
  Exactly what I thought, I have been going through the comments and seems to be something that most people don't think about, without video evidence to support what the voter says I call it lying.
mcantelon 14y ago
This exact scenario also happened on video in 2008: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MHwNZkNFlI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MHwNZkNFlI
doctorpangloss 14y ago
A $300 iPad does a better job than this $3,500 voting machine.
charlieok 14y ago
Much worse would be altering your vote without showing you that it did so
sakopov 14y ago
Wouldn't it be a good idea to have some sort of automated remote monitoring system which would randomly ping each machine for diagnostics data and shutdown machines if any issues discovered?
- TallGuyShort 14y ago
  If someone had enough access to tamper with the regions of the screen and their linking to voting options, what makes you think a remote monitoring system would be trivial?
shawn-butler 14y ago
All this talk of electronic voting and one-way hash, etc confuses me. I know of no aspect of the US Constitution or federal law nor the constitution of any state in which I have resided which mandates a secret ballot. It might be a tradition or something but it certainly isn't a civil right. I'm sure there is probably mountains of state law on the issue but I would have to wager any guarantee of secrecy would be just that, provided for on a state-by-state basis. I would appreciate it if anybody could correct my misunderstanding with citations. I think its much more important for an election result to be trusted than for it to be secret. Having both is optimal but not necessary for a valid result under the law with which I am familiar.
jrhorn424 14y ago
I'm not taking a stand on whether this is some weird edge case bug or whether it's a conspiracy, but I would like to point out that if it is fraud, it's an incredibly inept attempt. Using a checkbox for visual confirmation of a vote means the fraud was easily detectable. It would have been much better to mark the box for Obama but count the vote for Romney, if fraud is your goal.
Fargren 14y ago
Who manufactures these machines? I'm curious whether or not they may be vulnerable to Van Eck Phreaking[1]. Brazil discovered taht the machines they were going to use were vulnerable to it. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking
shirro 14y ago
Why does an otherwise fairly extraordinary country (space missions, amazing inventions, lots of creativity) manage to get basic stuff so completely wrong (bad toilet plumbing, units of measurement, paper currency, health care, dodgy voting). You need a proportional system. On paper. With hand counting by volunteers overseen by party reps. Stop with all the private enterprise technology stuff. Democracy is too precious to contract out to some lowest bidder. The Australian Electoral Commission runs all our ballots here and I have absolute confidence in them. Have a look at how other places run elections.
aioprisan 14y ago
that's nonsense, it was just a screen screwup and there's a paper trail on those machines, thank god.
jjp9999 14y ago
This is nothing. I was texting on my phone and it changed "Romny" to "Ronny." Microsoft must be behind it.
readme 14y ago
It looks like the touch screen might need to be calibrated. This used to happen on a POS system I worked with. I think the title is link bait. The voting machine isn't altering the vote. It's just off kilter. Besides, it's not like the user didn't know what box was being checked!
stevenwei 14y ago
In my opinion, this is very obviously a touchscreen calibration issue, probably caused by the use of a crappy (read: cheap) touchscreen in the voting machine. A lot of people are dismissing the calibration issue because of the "calibration test" the user described performing: "Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney's name and started tapping very closely together to find the 'active areas'. From the top of Romney's button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama's name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein's button was fine. All other buttons worked fine." However, this test does does not actually demonstrate anything. With resistive and infrared touchscreens, which are commonly used in kiosks, it is entirely possible to have some subsections of the screen work incorrectly, while the rest works correctly. Therefore the fact that some buttons work fine does not prove that the touchscreen is, in fact, correctly calibrated. I've done a lot of work with kiosk touchscreens, and the first culprit I thought of when seeing that video was that the touchscreen was miscalibrated. The second culprit I thought of was that the touchscreen itself was faulty. Resistive and infrared touchscreens are very prone to these types of problems, and I've seen many scenarios similar to this across hundreds of different touchscreens. (Often, just one corner of the screen will go out of wack, while the rest of it works perfectly. I've seen this happen many times.) The only way to know if the screen was actually correctly calibrated is to re-calibrate the screen and see if the issue persists, and if it does, to replace the touchscreen itself (as it could be faulty, not uncommon among cheap touchscreens either). Neither of these steps was performed by the user, therefore he has no way of concluding that the screen was correctly calibrated. I suspect that once these tests are performed, it will be obvious that the touchscreen is to blame. There's a lot of outrage here at the idea of the voting machine altering votes, but I think the following quote applies: never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. The real outrage should be that these voting machines were deployed with such crappy touchscreens built into them (probably to cut costs for the manufacturer).
awayand 14y ago
voting cannot be computerized ever without risk of manipulation. voting will always have to be on paper in the interest of democracy.
flyinRyan 14y ago
Why doesn't the US just buy the system Brazil uses? In Brazil 1) everyone must vote and 2) they have strong reasons for wanting to make sure that no vote can ever be tied directly to the person who cast it. They have such a system in place for over a decade, it works perfectly. Just buy that and use it instead of reinventing the wheel poorly.
iRobot 14y ago
Probably a touch screen calibration problem. Still bad though

1072 points by jipumarino 14y ago

The system here in Minnesota works much better. All ballots are paper ballots that are indelibly marked by voters. My wife and I voted this morning in our busy precinct in Minnesota, where there are some tight statewide contests about constitutional amendments and perhaps the most contested race for our state's House of Representatives of any electoral district in our state. As usual, we voted by marking bubble-shaped spaces on a paper ballot with a black pen. That provides an excellent audit trail for the voting. Machines can count such paper ballots very rapidly, and they are user-friendly for voters, and there is little ambiguity about how to vote. Minnesota has had ballots like this for at least a decade. But even at that, when a state has a razor-thin margin in an election, it can be maddening to figure out what happened. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/11/franken-coleman.html http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/11/franken-c... http://www.factcheck.org/elections/mining_the_minnesota_recount.html http://www.factcheck.org/elections/mining_the_minnesota_reco... The election to the United States Senate from Minnesota in 2008 was too close to call before the election, and even after millions of Minnesotans voted for one of three major party candidates, the margin between the top two candidates, Democrat Al Franken and Republican Norm Coleman, was so close that the margin was only one-hundredth of 1 percent of the votes cast in the election. That election really underscored the slogan "every vote counts." It's quite indefensible to use a voting system that doesn't leave a literal paper trail. The technology is well proven. But what really gives most election results legitimacy and staying power is a wide enough margin among votes cast by people who show up to vote that the old saying "Vox populi, vox Dei" can apply to the result. The people speak, and even the voters who didn't agree with the plurality have to listen. It's appalling that any state would have a voting system that could obscure what the consensus of the voters is. AFTER EDIT: Thanks for the several replies to this comment. Reading other replies posted to this thread since I first wrote this comment, I see several mentions of the systems in the Pacific Northwest states of having mail ballots mailed to voters. When I lived in Taiwan, more than a decade ago, I had a post office box there. Sometimes I would receive postal mail from the United States for the previous holders of that post office box, including State of Oregon ballots for two different Oregon voters (who were presumably each other's roommates while living in Taiwan). I always wondered, without giving into the temptation, whether I could have successfully filled out one (or both?) of those ballots and mailed them back from Taiwan to cast votes in an Oregon election. By contrast, I was never able to cast a Minnesota absentee ballot from Taiwan, even the time when I should have been regarded as having a stable permanent residence address here in the United States. So I missed out on voting in both the 1984 election and the ever-so-controversial election of 2000. I have no clear awareness of how mail ballots are authenticated as having been mailed by the voter to whom they belong (a signature on the envelope?) and hope that someone is checking to prevent those ballots from being misused.

amalag 14y ago
Virginia does this as well. I think it's a great system. No need for costly machines, just optical scanners which can be spot checked by pulling a percentage to verify. Plus you can scale it very easily, just add more people for ID checking and more spaces to sit and fill in the boxes. Virginia has both right now and a lot of people prefer to wait for the machine. I would love for them to switch completely to the paper marked ballots.
- dripton 14y ago
  We used to only have the optical scanners in Virginia. The machines are a recent addition, and a big step back. I want them gone.
digikata 14y ago
Yes, my county in California does this as well. A voter verifiable paper trail should be a requirement for voting systems - either as an optically read input, or a voter verifiable paper output placed into a ballot box as an audit check against the electronic results.
MartinCron 14y ago
Bringing up the Coleman/Franken election reminds me of my particular pet peeve. When the margin of victory is less than the margin of error, it's impossible to know the will of the people. One hundredth of one percent is not within any reasonable margin of error.
- danielweber 14y ago
  Yeah, we aren't willing to admit it, but every voting system has a margin of error. Even 1 in a thousand voters will have problems with completely unambiguous questions.
- Symmetry 14y ago
  In the end, if one candidate got 100,000 votes and the other got 100,001 then to the extent that we randomly select between the two I'm not sure that it really makes a difference which one wins. In this case the will of the people is that the two candidates are equally good. "The greatest value of free elections is in all of the out-of-equilibrium outcomes that, because of the regularity of free elections, never come close to happening."

tcohen 14y ago

confirmed by NBC http://on.msnbc.com/TIyxAl http://on.msnbc.com/TIyxAl

wbrendel 14y ago

What's wrong with paper ballots again? Serious question. In my area (northern MA), voters are given a ballot with a bubble next to each of the candidates' names. You use a marker to fill in the bubble next to the candidate you want to vote for, like 6-year-olds manage to do all the time on multiple choice tests in school. Then it gets read in by a machine, leaving a paper trail just in case. How are these electronic voting machines any better than that? With all the technical/fraud issues surrounding them, wouldn't it make sense to just use paper?

DirtyCalvinist 14y ago
Electronic voting machines allow for easier customization of text for edge cases, like a need for higher contrast, larger print or another language. A good compromise, I think, would be to have the electronic machines print out a human-readable paper ballot, and that would be counted as ballots used to be. The security/checkability of the old system with the convenience of the electronic interface.
- wbrendel 14y ago
  Those are good arguments, but are those benefits worth the millions of dollars we spend on these obviously flawed machines? It seems like overkill. Print some ballots with larger print and some in whatever languages are common in your area. If we do have to use electronic voting machines, I like your idea of it printing a paper ballot rather than tabulating the vote inside the machine.
  - trhtrsh 14y ago
    Millions of dollars is cheap for a properly conducted vote.
danielweber 14y ago
How do you count a smudge instead of a complete filling-in of the oval? You have humans go over them, and people hate that. Just because you never see this issue doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It's just that the ambiguous ballots don't matter in the vast majority of elections so no one cares. I'm not saying computers are better than paper. They each have trade-offs.

hcarvalhoalves 14y ago

I wouldn't attribute to malice what can be explained by a faulty touch screen. These incidents hurt the trust on the election process, though. The machines used on Brazillian elections are simpler but much better thought out, since it's impossible to input the wrong candidate. You have to input the number of the candidate, review his information and photo, then press "confirm" button. It doesn't present a list of candidates to choose from, so there are no biases. The US should adopt a similar machine. [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Brazil#The_Brazilian_voting_machines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Brazil#The_Brazili...

jackalope 14y ago

Obviously staged, obviously edited, obviously fake.

binaryorganic 14y ago
I'll give you obviously edited, but why so sure about the other two?
- bradmccarty 14y ago
  I can't even give obviously edited. Ever used a lower-end Android phone? I have, and this looks like a video directly from one. Jittery, frame skipping mess. Edit: Also, it's been verified and taken offline. http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/11/06/machine-turns-vote-for-obama-into-one-for-romney/ http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/11/06/machine-turns-vote-for-obama-...
  - binaryorganic 14y ago
    Obviously edited b/c of the distinct scene cut between the candidate selection that takes up the first half of the video, and the cast vote button which takes up the second half. All the commenter was saying was that whoever shot the video didn't share it before first splicing two different shots together.
    - MichaelApproved 14y ago
      "All the commenter was saying was that whoever shot the video didn't share it before first splicing two different shots together." That's not all the commenter was saying. OP was claiming the original video was staged and fake. He was accusing the Redditor if deception.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
clebio 14y ago
Evidence, citations? Not at all obvious. On the surface, looks quite real. And I've had enough touch-screen devices to know that mis-calibration is common, so it's plausible.

salman89 14y ago

Voting machines need to be a lot better than this or not exist at all, but does anyone actually think that IF this machine was altering votes, it would alter it in this fashion with a UI element tied to the alteration? Seems more like a crappy touch screen.

jneal 14y ago
This was my thought exactly. If someone was going through the trouble of altering votes, it would make no sense to make note of this within UI elements, it could just as easily "secretly" change the votes for 1/8 (just my theoretical magical number) voters and alter the results just enough without being noticeable.
- Nursie 14y ago
  I wonder though... maybe the inconvenience would be enough to either change a percentage of votes or make a few people give up. Looks like a bug, actually swings a close election?
- weaksauce 14y ago
  from the article (emphasis mine): > I initially selected Obama but Romney was highlighted. I assumed it was being picky so I deselected Romney and tried Obama again, this time more carefully, and still got Romney. Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney’s name and started tapping very closely together to find the ‘active areas’. From the top of Romney’s button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama’s name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein’s button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.
- swang 14y ago
  Except this just frustrates the voter and maybe he doesn't bother voting for Obama at all. There's no accusation of "altering" the votes because how do you track, "Touchscreen didn't select Obama, voter just gave up?"

morsch 14y ago

The shenanigans you seem to tolerate during elections are just incomprehensible to us foreigners. The number of horror stories I've heard in the last couple of weeks regarding everything from just weirdness of the system to blatant manipulation is farcical. It's possible that I'm getting a bleaker picture than reality, I suppose, since I only read about the broken stuff and not the instances where everything just works.

veridies 14y ago
For the most part, things aren't as bad as they seem. It's a huge country and any oddities gain a great deal of traction. Most votes go simply and smoothly. That being said, I'm taking a two hour drive later today to vote because my vote-by-mail ballot never arrived, so...
MartinCron 14y ago
It's possible that I'm getting a bleaker picture than reality, I suppose, since I only read about the broken stuff and not the instances where everything just works. You only hear about the ballots that crash, not the millions that land safely every election.
pnathan 14y ago
(1) We have > 300 M people. That's a huge population. (2) We are OK publicizing it. (3) Probability would indicate that we'll have a certain error, and it'll be shouted about. --- But it's very strange that it was "miscalibrated" to not select one particular candidate, no? :)
- 3JPLW 14y ago
  Selection bias, perhaps. Sure, there will be a small amount of miscalibrated machines. And a smaller amount will happen to be miscalibrated to select the wrong candidate. But you'll only ever hear about those latter cases. The others will be caught and corrected without internet vitriol.
- mindstab 14y ago
  > We have > 300 M people. That's a huge population Um, unless you're talking to India which manages to pull off votes with 1.2 Billion People. You are like 25% their population.

gte910h 14y ago

I hope this is a hoax.

dave1619 14y ago
Yeah, all it will take is a few more users taking videos from their phones of a similar thing happening, and then this things goes ballistic... especially if some people can't select Obama and Obama loses.
- jff 14y ago
  What about the other reports that mention votes for Romney being changed to Obama? It's just that "votes get switched to Romney" will make the Internet go ballistic--it's still a problem either way.
georgemcbay 14y ago
I hope it is a hoax or a miscalculation issue. If it is actual fraud, I hope the people behind it are found, tried and if convicted punished to a degree warranted by what this would be -- treason.
- gte910h 14y ago
  While I emotionally agree with you, I think overcharging is a bane on the existence of the legal system.

ditoa 14y ago

Looks like a calibration issue. They should have included selecting other candidates in the list. While not good enough (voting machines should be "perfect") calling it "altering votes" is a little much. It shows you that it has registered the wrong candidate, I would call this incorrectly registering input.

bibinou 14y ago
> I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine.
- ceejayoz 14y ago
  If true, why not include that in the video?
  - danielweber 14y ago
    Charitably, because they were sneaking it. Recording devices are not allowed in many (most?) states, precisely because it lets people sell votes. And although I think this is overblown, in general I think this seems a legit reason to sneak a recording.
- danielweber 14y ago
  If people have been pressing that "Obama" screen region all day, it could well be worn out. I wonder what the trade-offs are for randomizing each ballot.
hornbaker 14y ago
Did you read the article? "I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney’s name and started tapping very closely together to find the ‘active areas’. From the top of Romney’s button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama’s name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein’s button was fine. All other buttons worked fine."

WrkInProgress 14y ago

I wish they had also taken video of them selecting Jill Stein to see if the entire machine was calibrated incorrectly or just the Romney/Obama section.

ceejayoz 14y ago

Everyone's been spoiled by iPads etc., I guess. Old touch screens used to do this all the time. My Palm Pilot had a calibration app I'd have to run every few days/weeks. If he'd hit Mitt Romney, it probably wouldn't have selected Romney but the blank region above his name.

newsoundwave 14y ago
He mentions in the description for the video hitting Jill Stein selects Jill Stein. He was eventually able to vote by hitting a very small area between Obama and Jill Stein.
w1ntermute 14y ago
> If he'd hit Mitt Romney, it probably wouldn't have selected Romney but the blank region above his name. Wrong: > Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney's name and started tapping very closely together to find the 'active areas'. From the top of Romney's button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama's name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein's button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.
mmanfrin 14y ago
> I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine.
sixothree 14y ago
He describes in his comments how he touched numerous points down each of the candidates and all points registered for the correct candidate except for Obama. That makes it not sound like a calibration error to me.
hnriot 14y ago
It's so funny to see that hardly anyone actually did anything more than just watch the video. The same "oh it must have been miscalibrated" is repeated up and down the comment page. Let's hope whomever gets elected spends money on education so that people start reading again and not just consuming the 5 second Reader's Digest version.

ambiguator 14y ago

Seems like the obvious solution would be to close off the broken voting machine.

MartinCron 14y ago
I got really into playing pinball a few years ago, and I got into the habit of turning of a pinball machine whenever it wasn't working correctly (mis-aligned flippers, whatever) so that other people didn't waste their quarters. Yes, it was kind of obnoxious. Sorry. Anyway, a similar mechanism to say "hey, this voting machine might be screwed up, somebody check it out ASAP!" would make a lot of sense.

BlackNapoleon 14y ago

I saw this earlier and I noted that news agencies seemed to be reluctant to post it. CNN has been on this from the jump. I think people are afraid of it being revealed as a fake. There is some serious validation that needs to occur if this is the case.

cwe 14y ago

NBC News confirming they've removed this particular machine because of this: http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/11/06/machine-turns-vote-for-obama-into-one-for-romney/ http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/11/06/machine-turns-vote-for-obama-...

danielweber 14y ago
Which is proper. The report that the volunteer said "everything will be okay" is the worst part of this. Systems need to recognize and isolate damage, not assume it will never occur.
- trhtrsh 14y ago
  Really, intentionally disregarding a broken machine is felony election tampering. We shouldn't have bored old ladies running precincts, we should cough up for paid, trained professionals.

llambda 14y ago

What I've read[1][2] in regard to this incident is that it is most likely a calibration issue: i.e. the touch screen is improperly calibrated and as a result is not selecting the proper region of the screen. Now this is concerning because it likely means other machines could be or are miscalibrated. However the important takeaway here is that this is not some malicious attempt to rig the vote. If that were the case the likely method would be completely invisible from the UI; why would an attacker bother to actually show a user they were being manipulated? Of course, they wouldn't. [1] Joseph Hall comments here, also provides a link to further commentary by him: http://gawker.com/5958114/an-expert-weighs-in-on-that-viral-reddit-voter-fraud-video http://gawker.com/5958114/an-expert-weighs-in-on-that-viral-... [2] http://www.theawl.com/2012/11/the-truth-about-voting-machines http://www.theawl.com/2012/11/the-truth-about-voting-machine...

ljoshua 14y ago
Yes, very likely a calibration issue. There was a similar instance occurring here in Colorado [1], but in the opposite direction (a vote for Romney went in as Obama). The machines definitely need to get better, but it is probably not fraud or a hack of any sort. [1] http://www.chieftain.com/politics/pueblo-county-voting-machines-being-tested-state-audit-failing-to/article_60337fae-2783-11e2-9e19-001a4bcf887a.html http://www.chieftain.com/politics/pueblo-county-voting-machi...
Anjin 14y ago
Unfortunately no, if you read what he wrote in the comments of that submission: Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney's name and started tapping very closely together to find the 'active areas'. From the top of Romney's button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama's name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein's button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.
- 14y ago

pebb 14y ago

He who casts a vote decides nothing. He who counts the votes decides everything

shitlord 14y ago

Is it too much to ask to just completely open-source these voting machine? These machines decide the future of our country and affect the entire world. The least we could do is allow everyone to verify for themselves whether the machines are secure.

danielweber 14y ago
Make sure you open-source the compiler, the firmware, the hardware manufacturing process, the assembly, the drivers, the software that built the compiler, and the software that built the compiler that built the compiler. Or just operate under the assumption that some of the machines are compromised and make sure you have ways of recognizing faults after-the-fact.
- verbatim 14y ago
  You say this in a way that implies that it's not feasible to do such a thing. I'm pretty sure that all of those components have been open sourced in various projects, just maybe not all in the same system.

elbac 14y ago

How to Rig an Election: The G.O.P. aims to paint the country red http://harpers.org/archive/2012/11/how-to-rig-an-election/?single=1 http://harpers.org/archive/2012/11/how-to-rig-an-election/?s...

btilly 14y ago

There have been problems like this in every election with these machines. More troubling, exit polls and voting results have routinely disagreed with each other since 2000. In most countries that would be taken as proof that the election was not fair. But not in the USA! http://www.ukprogressive.co.uk/breaking-retired-nsa-analyst-proves-gop-is-stealing-elections/article20598.html http://www.ukprogressive.co.uk/breaking-retired-nsa-analyst-... claims evidence of systemic manipulation of the vote, with the trend strongly being in the GOP's favor. I have not personally verified, but it would not surprise me. Anyone who has been paying attention this election cycle knows about the attempts by both sides to manipulate rules about who can vote, when, in ways that advantage themselves and disadvantage each other. That happens in a lot of elections but not to the extent of this one. With weird results such as, because of a recent law in Ohio, polling workers have to ASK for ID, but due to a court decision, they can't stop you from voting if you DON'T have that ID. (Confused polling workers are sure to get this wrong.) The general trend is that Republicans want as many barriers to voting in person as possible, while Democrats want as many to be able to vote as possible. That is because more marginal voters are much more likely to be Democrat than the general population. The stated reason is "to prevent fraud" even though there is very little evidence of such fraud in practice. On mail-in ballots this reverses, since the GOP expects a large portion of mail-in ballots to be from military people who are likely to vote Republican. Fraud has been more of an issue with mail-in ballots, but obviously people are not as worried about that. Laws get broken as well. For instance the 2000 election was decided in Florida, in part due to a voter purge that the courts decided was illegal. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Central_Voter_File http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Central_Voter_File for verification of that. The lesson learned is that voter purges work, which is why Florida was trying to do a purge this year at the last minute despite being warned that it was illegal. Because flipping the choice for President was easily worth the slap on the wrist they got afterwards. There already have been laws broken this year (see http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57535950/man-charged-after-tossing-voter-registration-forms-in-virginia/ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57535950/man-charged-aft... and http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/national/fbi-launches-investigation-into-fraudulent-florida-voter-letters/1258211 http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/national/fbi-launches-... for example), and everyone expects the lawyers to be gainfully employed as a result. In short, get out your popcorn. When we exercise our right to vote, the vested interests exercise what they see as their right to manipulate the vote, and this time there is a decent chance of fireworks.

cloudwalking 14y ago

I am a red-blooded technologist, but I think voting should be done on paper ballots. Call me a luddite, but it's just too easy to manipulate votes--either at the time of voting or in post-processing--with an electronic voting machine. That being said, the only conceivable way to have a secure electronic voting process is to use a completely open source system. Open source hardware and software, with publicly viewable results.

cpeterso 14y ago
What problem do electronic voting machines actually solve? The US didn't seem to have problems counting millions of paper ballots (save for some hanging chads) until the "solution" of electronic voting machines appeared.
- michaelt 14y ago
  As I understand it the intention is to solve: 1. Allowing people with disabilities to vote. For example, headphone voice prompts for blind people, large print/high contrast for the elderly etc. 2. Making sure voters understand the voting procedure - particularly if there are multiple offices and issues on the ballot, multiple ballot papers and so on. 3. Ensuring voters' intent is recorded unambiguously. For example, you can't put marks in multiple boxes (intentionally or accidentally) and you can't leave a dimpled or hanging chad. 4. Perfect counting (assuming the data is entered correctly and the software works right) as opposed to manual counts where papers sometimes end up in the wrong pile. 5. You can offer voting in multiple languages. 6. You can randomise the order of candidates on the ballot, to evenly distribute any impact being at the top might have. 7. Ability to take backups for transit or deliver results electronically, avoiding boxes of ballots going missing. 8. Reduced counting costs and faster results, allowing more polling stations to be operated and allowing the polls to stay open later for the same result delivery deadline. Whether it succeeds at offering these benefits, and whether they're worth the obvious cost in trust is debatable.
danielweber 14y ago
If your plan to secure the machines is to have the source be open, you have already failed. You need a system that works well even if the source has been altered. Paper ballots have issues, too. They are different issues, and largely unseen by the general public until you have a really close election and have to use human judgment to decide whether that mark counts as a vote or not.

anonymouz 14y ago

Even if this is just accidental or some weird calibration issue (weird, because it only seems to affect one button according to the report), it just goes to show how little confidence one can have in these machines. Does anyone think if they can't get the touchscreen right, the remaining parts of the system can be expected to work correctly? The only positive thing is that such an easy to demonstrate failure might open the eyes of the less technically educated parts of the public to how bad an idea it is to use electronic voting machines. Any suggested replacement of paper ballots comes with such a huge bag of problems (sometimes inherent in the method, and not merely problems of the implementation), and so few advantages that it puzzles me why anyone would want to introduce them.

ricardobeat 14y ago
The fact that the current implementation is not reliable doesn't make the whole idea of electronic voting bad. We've had electronic voting for general elections in Brazil since 2000, with very few accusations of fraud.
- anonymouz 14y ago
  But there are very significant issues with the principle of electronic voting: Ideally, every voter would be able to verify their own vote after the fact via some cryptographic mechanism. But on the other hand, this mechanism should be such that the government (or another individual trying to coerce our voter) would not be able to verify the vote -- an almost contradictory, difficult requirement. I am not aware of such a method being employed in any large-scale election. In the absence of such a method, you have a heap of problems: 1) How do you make it verifiable for the general public? Even if you accept that the general public will not be able to verify it (bad!), how would you make it verifiable even for experts? It's almost impossible to ensure that the code being run is the one you verified beforehand, especially on such a large scale, so this way is out of the question. (Remember, this is a high-stakes game, so you'd better know that your CPU in fact executes your opcodes correctly...) 2) Electronic voting & tallying opens the door for large-scale manipulation without leaving traces. If you want to remove 10000 paper ballots, you have to somehow get rid of them (with people watching). 10000 votes vanishing in a computer? No problem, just a memory operation, a bystander would never notice it. Some of this can be dealt with by having the machine print out a paper ballot immediately after voting, and keeping those ballots. Then you're in fact using the relative safety of paper ballot voting to double check the electronic record.

ricardobeat 14y ago

I can't fathom why would you even choose touchscreens for voting machines. It's a simple interface, mechanical buttons are much better. They are more durable, offer tactile feedback and can be used by people with visual impairment.

forgingahead 14y ago

This happened earlier as well during the early voting period (though Romney votes were being switched for Obama -- funny how one got coverage whilst the other didn't). It's not some conspiracy, just a calibration error. Source: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/03/Electronic-Voting-Machines-In-Battleground-States-Switching-Romney-Votes-For-Obama http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/03/Electroni...

forgingahead 14y ago
Google cache since Breitbart is getting hammered: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.breitbart.com%2FBig-Government%2F2012%2F11%2F03%2FElectronic-Voting-Machines-In-Battleground-States-Switching-Romney-Votes-For-Obama&rlz=1C1CHFA_enUS485US486&oq=cache%3Awww.breitbart.com%2FBig-Government%2F2012%2F11%2F03%2FElectronic-Voting-Machines-In-Battleground-States-Switching-Romney-Votes-For-Obama&sugexp=chrome,mod=0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.b...
zero_intp 14y ago
oddly, breitbart is perhaps one of the least reputable media sources on the internet these days. They are great if you are looking for biased, unfounded, or fraudulent "facts" to support an extractive wealth policy that exploits "undesirables"

armored_mammal 14y ago

Is there any evidence that what it records actually matches the screen anyway?

danielweber 14y ago
There is a user-visible printed receipt that is not shown in the video.

wallacrw 14y ago

Is it real, and Republicans are fraudsters? Or is it a fake, and Democrats are fraudsters? Or is a Republican plant of a fake so that I believe I hate Democrats?!? Or maybe even Democrats planted an obvious fake, to make me think Republicans posted the fake, so that I'd know it's fake and end up disrespecting Republicans for the poor attempt at influencing me?!?!?! Too confusing. I'm staying home.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

donerKebab 14y ago

Why does this matter? The majority of votes is not the decider in this 'democracy'.

bryanh 14y ago

Looks like a touch screen that isn't calibrated correctly.

astrodust 14y ago
It's 2012. You can buy touch screens that don't need constant "calibration". These machines are using 1980s caliber technology when this was a constant problem. The last touch screen I've worked with that had this issue was CRT-based. All these machines should do, presuming you need machines at all, is print out a receipt with the vote clearly indicated so that it can be deposited in a traditional ballot box. Leaving the tabulation a "trade secret" is really not a good idea.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

kevinalexbrown 14y ago

If there were one aspect of electronic voting I could change it would be the following: allow electronic votes to be reviewed by each individual at a later date, from two independent organizations. Each vote gets sent to two independent electronic counting organizations, and each let you verify your vote after the election, with an (anonymous) confirmation number issued at voting time. If enough people cry foul to rule out a large group collectively lying or forgetting their confirmation numbers, fraud would be much easier to establish and localize. Moreover, requiring each independent database of votes to match to within some margin would also decrease the likelihood of fraud by requiring collusion between both organizations. EDIT: Note that the confirmation number would be issued to you anonymously and sans receipt - there would be no way to prove your vote - you could have found some random confirmation number, and no recourse for a single citizen crying foul. The point, rather, is that if several hundred or thousand individuals noticed that their vote seemed to have changed, the likelihood that they were all making it up or forgetting their confirmation numbers would decrease substantially.

eli 14y ago
Definitely not! It's a secret ballot -- you cannot have any way to prove which candidates you voted for.
- goostavos 14y ago
  I was not the best civics student.. What is the significance of it being secret? Being able to verify your vote seems like a pretty simple, good thing ( I would think ).
  - tobias3 14y ago
    Someone can give you money to vote for a specific candidate and verify that you voted correctly via the confirmation code.
  - ry0ohki 14y ago
    So say if some party were to gain power and start harassing people that voted for the other party...

tucosan 14y ago

For those who are able to understand german and are not from the US, i highly recommend the newest alternativlos podcast for perspective: http://alternativlos.org/28/ http://alternativlos.org/28/

onli 14y ago

What do you expect? Opaque source-code, machines produced by companies linked to the Republicans, and all that in a failing state. Stuff like that was obviously going to happen.

mkhpalm 14y ago

Jeez, I thought HN people were sharper than this about modern technology. I'm not a Romney supporter but these voting machines are basic single touch interfaces with standard fat-finger algorithms. Lets have him pull back on the camera and show the rest of the screen. Specifically, where his other finger is at the time it selects Romney. His video is highly suspect to me.

sukuriant 14y ago

What show was it that discussed what would happen with a large number of very smart engineers and voting? I recall a TV show back in the day that basically said "We don't use electronic voting because it's too easy to game". I think it was one of the episodes of Sliders.

realrocker 14y ago

Calibration!! Really?? Any software/hardware developer here worth his/her salt would agree that can't be it. Let's see what could have happened: 1) The Y axis of the screen was maladjusted 2) Touch Sensitivity of the screen was reduced due to incorrect settings 3) Touch area had hair/dust/oil on it. But if you read the voter's story it happened only for Obama's field. Don't they have independent watchdogs looking after this thing in United States? If shit like this went down in India, the Election Commission would have simply closed the whole damn polling booth(for the day) and arrange separate polling on a later day with extra scrutiny and security.

evan_ 14y ago
> But if you read the voter's story it happened only for Obama's field. Easy explanation- the voter was lying.
stevenwei 14y ago
Disagree. I've worked with resistive/infrared touchscreens for many years and this behavior is entirely consistent with touchscreen calibration errors, especially with cheap/crappy touchscreens. See my other comments here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4752605 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4752605

beatpanda 14y ago

This is just the tip of the iceberg, folks. If you're in the U.S. I highly reccomend being a poll worker in a contentious district in a swing state if you ever get the chance. I was in a suburb of Denver last election and saw all kinds of shenanigans, from people pulling fire alarms to clear out the polling places to people walking aaround with laptops "checking voter registration" (actually just lying to people to get them to go home). There was also this, a few weeks ago: http://www.nationalmemo.com/man-connected-to-virginia-gop-arrested-for-destroying-voter-registration-forms/ http://www.nationalmemo.com/man-connected-to-virginia-gop-ar... The fact is that there is a concerted, coordinated effort to tamper with the vote every single election. I have no way of knowing whether this specific incident was malicious, but I sure wouldn't be surprised if it was.

indiecore 14y ago
Isn't denying someone the right to vote a crime?
- beatpanda 14y ago
  Oh, absolutely. But whether these things get prosecuted is a highly partisan affair.
- bobwaycott 14y ago
  Not only that, but it is grounds to apply Section 2 of the 14th Amendment. Not many people seem to be aware of the second clause. Basically, it says that any state found to be denying citizens their vote will have their representation in Congress proportionately decreased in accordance with how many people were denied their voting right. All this nonsense about voter IDs, altering votes, making it difficult for people to vote in contentious areas (e.g., the Florida districts who have already filed suits in the last couple days) and the like should really be handled by applying the 14th Amendment. Or at least by the executive making a clear statement that it will do so. Any attempt to disenfranchise people should be met with Section 2.
  - pbhjpbhj 14y ago

maurits 14y ago

Can someone explain me like a five year old (european) how it is that... You put a man on the moon, flew the space shuttle, have a rover sending holiday pics from mars, not to mention, your entire computer industrie.... But you can not make or agree a voting machine that actually works beyond reasonable doubt?!

gte910h 14y ago
The issue is that we have several voting machines that DO work. They're just not what certain states bought. Were these bought for nefarious reasons? Perhaps. Are they bad even if they were just purchased due to incompetence/graft? Yes.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

melkisch 14y ago

If you don't want to have your vote altered. You can go on https://poutsch.com https://poutsch.com The cool thing is that the whole planet can vote there!

jordanthoms 14y ago

Simpsons did it... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBaX9GPSaQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBaX9GPSaQ

raverbashing 14y ago

Obligatory reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBaX9GPSaQ#t=18s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBaX9GPSaQ#t=18s I was surprised to see how similar it was.

ommunist 14y ago

Oh, how sad the vigilante cannot film the pesky RAM-inhabiting daemon, that summate counting and distributes electronic votes according to the AdSense spending of every candidate. Even the iPhone is not capable of doing that surveillance.

JoeCortopassi 14y ago

I know that this will remain at the bottom of this thread, because it doesn't have enough conspiracy theory in it, but does anyone really think that this is actual vote tampering? I mean, why on earth would you tamper with a voting machine so that it stuffs the ballot, but have it update the UI so that the user can see and report the error? This should fall to the way side of failing basic logic, but it doesn't because people want a sensationalist article to argue over. Changing votes would be much easier to do on the back end, and would have the additional benefit of never being detected by the user

VMG 14y ago
But what is the other explanation then?
- usaar333 14y ago
  touchscreen calibration errors or related software glitches. I've certainly seen my own phone get screwed up enough on occasion that a touch on point x registered at y.
  - takeda64 14y ago
    except the guy who recorded it claims that selecting candidate that's below Obama worked correctly.
    - usaar333 14y ago
      From my phone experiences, it isn't always a matter of a touch being shifted up/down by X everyone. Sometimes individual areas are screwed up. (as a simple experiment, I can put some water droplets on my nexus S and things go haywire unpredictably). I'm doubtful this is malicious not so much because I'm some idealist that believes voter fraud doesn't happen, but because of all ways to commit fraud, this is a but ridiculous - it's obvious to everyone the machine is recording wrong and it will be noticed.
- m_myers 14y ago

spectrum 14y ago

In the Netherlands they got rid of voting machines all together in 2008. A group set out to ensure that the election process in the Netherlands would become as fraud resistant as it was before the advent of paperless voting computers. They demonstrated that the voting machines could be hacked. It wass also a risk because of the small group involved in getting the results out of these computers, with no real possibility to check if they are real (because the source code is not open). Committing fraud would only have to involve a few people. On May 16, 2008 the Dutch government decided that elections in the Netherlands will be held using paper ballots and red pencil only. A proposal to develop a new generation of voting computers was rejected. More info at http://wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/English http://wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/English

johncoltrane 14y ago

What exactly are supposed to be the benefits of electronic voting machines over sliping a piece of paper in an enveloppe and putting it in an urn?

scotty79 14y ago

Why not this http://www.ted.com/talks/david_bismark_e_voting_without_fraud.html http://www.ted.com/talks/david_bismark_e_voting_without_frau... ?

bratao 14y ago

Citing felipeko: Brazil actually has a very organized election. Aside from bad politicians we have to chose from, the election does not have many problems. We have a judicial system just for election (with judges and clear laws) ready to take actions (and they do take) when something goes wrong. All election occurs in one day, a sunday so everyone can vote, and the results usually come in less than 4 hours, because all vote is electronic.

blisper 14y ago

I asked for paper ballot this morning. Many volunteers are cheerful and apathetic, for them its just another gig. Lost on them is the fact this is something fundamental. Scary !!

bane 14y ago

"It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting." - Jumpers (1972)

nsxwolf 14y ago

This seems like a fairly poor way to implement voter fraud. The screen gives instant feedback. No Obama voter is going to say "Oh well, I guess I'll just cast my vote for Romney then." If you were reprogramming the machine, wouldn't you be better off changing it to show Obama had been selected on the screen, but then print Romney onto the paper ballot? There's a better chance a voter won't bother scrutinizing the printout.

afterburner 14y ago

This is serious, but I'm getting a lot of amusing out of news reporters asking questions on Reddit, and have dozens of Reddit users pipe in with jokes.

short_circut 14y ago

It seems to me a way to mitigate this risk of part of the screen not working is to randomize the order with which the candidates are displayed. The error would presumably average itself out. Either way this is unacceptable.

csmatt 14y ago

A bit off-topic, but how do recounts work with electronic voting machines?

kbutler 14y ago
It varies. Some systems have a "recount" button that returns the same result as before. Others have an actual paper trail that can be recounted by hand.

FrojoS 14y ago

I never understood why we would go for electronic voting. I couldn't care less about the discussion here about touch screens or GUIs. Computer should have no buisnes for important, secret elections! In my opinion the risks and downsides of moving away from pen and paper clearly outweigh any of the laughable advantages - unless of course you profit from a system that is in-transparent and manipulatable.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

ww520 14y ago

I think a system of repeatability for voting is important. Once a voter has casted a vote, his vote should be able to be repeated without change in different systems at will to verify that his vote has not been tampered. The system can work like this: - Voter is assigned a unique ID, on his voting card issued upon verifying his identity. He can pick a security pin for added security. - Voter is given a device thumb drive, RFID with some RAM, whatever storage device. - Voter goes to a machine to vote. The machine cryptographically signs the voting result with his id. The machine writes the result to his storage device, emails him a copy, and/or puts the result on a public website. The machine also sends the result to a central server for compilation. - Voter can go to any other machine on any other sites, plug in his result, his id, and his pin to see the voting result for verification. Voter can confirm by sending the result to central server. Or submit the signed result to third party website to display it for verification. - If there's any mismatch, voter raises hell and demands to invalidate old vote (after verifying his identity, id, and pin), revote, and burn the tampering machine. Edit: Id obviously means a public/private key pair.

jcmoscon 14y ago

LOL probably just needs to touch a little bit lower on the screen. If you're not smart enough to figure that out, you should NOT be allowed to vote.

ne0codex 14y ago

This seriously pisses me the fuck off. Just how the hell do we not have the technology yet for accurate touch-screen technology in voting machines?

dhughes 14y ago

Canadian here but I'm curious wouldn't it make sense for voting machines to have independent dual screens instead of a single screen where the possibility of a calibration error could exist?

tomflack 14y ago

Lower house - http://aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_Vote/Voting_HOR.htm#papers http://aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_Vote/Voting_HOR.htm#papers Senate - http://aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_Vote/Voting_Senate.htm#papers http://aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_Vote/Voting_Senate.htm#paper... This is how we vote in Australia. I have real trouble seeing any system of computerized voting or punch-card voting as superior having followed the United States' experiences. What do you guys think? We use preferential-voting, so it's a little different but the idea is solid.

satori99 14y ago

The US uses a federal agency to collect income taxes, so why won't it do the obvious thing and create one to run federal elections?

trhtrsh 14y ago
US does not have federal elections. US has state elections for Senate, Congress, and the Electoral College.

Xcelerate 14y ago

I'm not trying to be snarky: could someone explain to me why this is HN-worthy (or at least worth 609 points)? In an election with thousands of voting machines, the probability is high enough that at least a few of them will be defective in some way; it should be expected as far as I can tell.

shawn-butler 14y ago
Unsubstantiated rumors of vote tampering via technological means on election night is the ultimate link-bait? Seems pretty clear why it is worth so many points :) If only the specifications of the hardware and source for the software for the machine in question were available for us to analyze....

damncabbage 14y ago

Potential voter purging in Pennsylvania: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/11/watchdog-evidence-unlawful-voter-purge-pennsylvania http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/11/watchdog-evidence-un... Oregon worker altering ballots in the GOP's favor: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/11/06/oregon-election-worker-fired-for-altering-ballots-to-republican-straight-ticket/ http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/11/06/oregon-election-worker... At least one worker taking votes and putting them under the voting box: https://twitter.com/danicamckellar/status/265907196372594688 https://twitter.com/danicamckellar/status/265907196372594688 https://twitter.com/danicamckellar/status/26590774867435110 https://twitter.com/danicamckellar/status/26590774867435110 ... What the hell is going on over there?

Gabler 14y ago

I would be more outraged if the video actually showed him tapping the other candidates to prove that they worked correctly. He says that tapping the others worked fine but there is no proof of this in the video.

LoneWolf 14y ago
Exactly what I thought, I have been going through the comments and seems to be something that most people don't think about, without video evidence to support what the voter says I call it lying.

mcantelon 14y ago

This exact scenario also happened on video in 2008: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MHwNZkNFlI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MHwNZkNFlI

doctorpangloss 14y ago

A $300 iPad does a better job than this $3,500 voting machine.

charlieok 14y ago

Much worse would be altering your vote without showing you that it did so

sakopov 14y ago

Wouldn't it be a good idea to have some sort of automated remote monitoring system which would randomly ping each machine for diagnostics data and shutdown machines if any issues discovered?

TallGuyShort 14y ago
If someone had enough access to tamper with the regions of the screen and their linking to voting options, what makes you think a remote monitoring system would be trivial?

shawn-butler 14y ago

All this talk of electronic voting and one-way hash, etc confuses me. I know of no aspect of the US Constitution or federal law nor the constitution of any state in which I have resided which mandates a secret ballot. It might be a tradition or something but it certainly isn't a civil right. I'm sure there is probably mountains of state law on the issue but I would have to wager any guarantee of secrecy would be just that, provided for on a state-by-state basis. I would appreciate it if anybody could correct my misunderstanding with citations. I think its much more important for an election result to be trusted than for it to be secret. Having both is optimal but not necessary for a valid result under the law with which I am familiar.

jrhorn424 14y ago

I'm not taking a stand on whether this is some weird edge case bug or whether it's a conspiracy, but I would like to point out that if it is fraud, it's an incredibly inept attempt. Using a checkbox for visual confirmation of a vote means the fraud was easily detectable. It would have been much better to mark the box for Obama but count the vote for Romney, if fraud is your goal.

Fargren 14y ago

Who manufactures these machines? I'm curious whether or not they may be vulnerable to Van Eck Phreaking[1]. Brazil discovered taht the machines they were going to use were vulnerable to it. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking

shirro 14y ago

Why does an otherwise fairly extraordinary country (space missions, amazing inventions, lots of creativity) manage to get basic stuff so completely wrong (bad toilet plumbing, units of measurement, paper currency, health care, dodgy voting). You need a proportional system. On paper. With hand counting by volunteers overseen by party reps. Stop with all the private enterprise technology stuff. Democracy is too precious to contract out to some lowest bidder. The Australian Electoral Commission runs all our ballots here and I have absolute confidence in them. Have a look at how other places run elections.

aioprisan 14y ago

that's nonsense, it was just a screen screwup and there's a paper trail on those machines, thank god.

jjp9999 14y ago

This is nothing. I was texting on my phone and it changed "Romny" to "Ronny." Microsoft must be behind it.

readme 14y ago

It looks like the touch screen might need to be calibrated. This used to happen on a POS system I worked with. I think the title is link bait. The voting machine isn't altering the vote. It's just off kilter. Besides, it's not like the user didn't know what box was being checked!

stevenwei 14y ago

In my opinion, this is very obviously a touchscreen calibration issue, probably caused by the use of a crappy (read: cheap) touchscreen in the voting machine. A lot of people are dismissing the calibration issue because of the "calibration test" the user described performing: "Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney's name and started tapping very closely together to find the 'active areas'. From the top of Romney's button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama's name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein's button was fine. All other buttons worked fine." However, this test does does not actually demonstrate anything. With resistive and infrared touchscreens, which are commonly used in kiosks, it is entirely possible to have some subsections of the screen work incorrectly, while the rest works correctly. Therefore the fact that some buttons work fine does not prove that the touchscreen is, in fact, correctly calibrated. I've done a lot of work with kiosk touchscreens, and the first culprit I thought of when seeing that video was that the touchscreen was miscalibrated. The second culprit I thought of was that the touchscreen itself was faulty. Resistive and infrared touchscreens are very prone to these types of problems, and I've seen many scenarios similar to this across hundreds of different touchscreens. (Often, just one corner of the screen will go out of wack, while the rest of it works perfectly. I've seen this happen many times.) The only way to know if the screen was actually correctly calibrated is to re-calibrate the screen and see if the issue persists, and if it does, to replace the touchscreen itself (as it could be faulty, not uncommon among cheap touchscreens either). Neither of these steps was performed by the user, therefore he has no way of concluding that the screen was correctly calibrated. I suspect that once these tests are performed, it will be obvious that the touchscreen is to blame. There's a lot of outrage here at the idea of the voting machine altering votes, but I think the following quote applies: never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. The real outrage should be that these voting machines were deployed with such crappy touchscreens built into them (probably to cut costs for the manufacturer).

awayand 14y ago

voting cannot be computerized ever without risk of manipulation. voting will always have to be on paper in the interest of democracy.

flyinRyan 14y ago

Why doesn't the US just buy the system Brazil uses? In Brazil 1) everyone must vote and 2) they have strong reasons for wanting to make sure that no vote can ever be tied directly to the person who cast it. They have such a system in place for over a decade, it works perfectly. Just buy that and use it instead of reinventing the wheel poorly.

iRobot 14y ago

Probably a touch screen calibration problem. Still bad though