12 ms·

(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

by 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.
- danielweber 14y ago
  If you vote with paper, you don't worry at all if it's counted right. Note that this doesn't mean it's counted right: it just means you have no way to worry about it. Maybe election officials are debating whether that line for Joe is a mistake or not. Now the problems are seen immediately instead of unseen, which was one of the driving forces for people who didn't want to ever go through the hanging chad issue again. I'm certainly not saying computer voting is better than paper voting -- they each have their trade-offs. (I'd prefer paper ballots that voters can "self-scan" by a machine that is very conservative in what it accepts, but that's a whole separate discussion.)
  - trhtrsh 14y ago
    An electronic voting machine may present an obvious error in the UI and ALSO may present a hidden error in pubishing the vote. So it's worse.
- param 14y ago
  Dear Sir, As an Indian I can testify that we actually have far more election abuse - people being blocked from entering a voting booth, vote boxes(still vote on paper) being stolen, voting booths set on fire... Of course, again, there is media acting as a watchdog, and a hope that the manipulation is statistically insignificant.
  - masklinn 14y ago
    > vote boxes(still vote on paper) FWIW, most of the world votes on paper, and if history's anything to go by paper ballot is way more reliable than electronic, at least when it comes to auditability. I'm sure it's possible to design a secure and tamper-proof electronic voting system[0] with a great, useable interface... but nobody seems interested in doing that. [0] system, not machine, because you most likely want the machine recording votes and the machine tallying them to be fully separate.
  - azharcs 14y ago
    I would like to disagree with Mr.Param who is either being a cynic or trying to be "me-too". India is aggressively moving away from paper-ballot voting to EVM's. In our last general elections, a million electronic voting machines (EVM's) were used which reduces vote-rigging, ballot capture etc. In maybe 5 years, we will be completely rid of paper-ballots. For further read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_voting_machines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_voting_machines India also has option called "None of the Above" as a voting option, which is extremely democratic.
    - param 14y ago
      All right, I have been living in the US for a while, and didn't know about the move to electronic voting. However, my point about there being FAR more abuse in India stands. Here are some references: Fatal attacks near polling booth - 2009 - http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123985213176424031.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123985213176424031.html Booth capturing "found primarily in India" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booth_capturing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booth_capturing intimidation on racial lines: http://uk.oneworld.net/article/view/162808/1/5847 http://uk.oneworld.net/article/view/162808/1/5847 You are plain kidding if you feel elections in India are anywhere close to being as good as US.
- pnathan 14y ago
  > http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=countries%20by%20population http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=countries%20by%20popula... this is a lot of people. I am sure that if we investigate the details of elections in India, Indonesia, and Brazil, we will find an array of fudged votes and issues. In other words, I am pretty sure that the error rate for the mix of remote/paper/electronic voting will hold pretty constant regardless of population size.
  - felipeko 14y ago
    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.
- jusben1369 14y ago
  Somehow, given the context of this thread, I suspect you're realize this wasn't really a very productive counter ;-)
citricsquid 14y ago
> But it's very strange that it was "miscalibrated" to not select one particular candidate, no? :) The internet loves Obama. There are many stories of people that support Obama cheating the system (right now there's a popular story of someone admitting on Facebook to voting for Obama 4 times...) and that isn't on the front page of HN, when that is absolutely confirmed to be a misuse of the system. Everything that is a disadvantage for Obama is naturally going to get more attention, because most of the internet age that use sites like reddit and HN are the sort that want progress. I'll bet there are machines that have this problem (assuming this is not an isolated incident and his a software/hardware issue) that vote for Obama when Romney is clicked, but that won't be big news in this circle of news because who cares about Romney here? Edit: here you go, same problem that affects Romney votes on another machine http://www.cbs42.com/content/localnews/story/Voting-machines-switch-Romney-votes-to-Obama/m9dR8WDjbUKX8OFu4meIFQ.cspx http://www.cbs42.com/content/localnews/story/Voting-machines...
- marshallp 14y ago
  The republicans are the party of liars. Who is more likely to actually commit these crimes? Republicans. Even the 4 votes thing you came up with is probably republicans spreading lies.
  - baltimore 14y ago
    Seriously? Why are you even here (HN)? This place does not suffer trolls lightly.
    - mkr-hn 14y ago
      HN loves trolls as long as they aren't lazy about it.
    - marshallp 14y ago
      What? Are you denying Romnesia, or the lies that led to the Iraq war. Or Nixon's party. Or that the military-industrial xomplex and big oil is allied with republicans. Or Peter Norvig's analysis of who you should vote for http://norvig.com/election-faq-2012.html http://norvig.com/election-faq-2012.html It's easy to call "troll" and try to sneakily shout out the other person. You should try some self-reflection if you're a republican. If you've got enough inquisitiveness to be on HN, apply that to deciphering what the republican party actually stands for.
tlrobinson 14y ago
Note the video didn't show him trying to select other candidates.
- eloquence 14y ago
  This. There have been similar reports of those trying to select Obama.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
skrause 14y ago
I never understand the population argument. Counting votes is perfectly scalable, if one in a thousand people volunteers to count votes it doesn't matter if your population is 1000 or one billion. In Germany voting machines have been banned completely with good reasons, because they're unsafe and easy to to hack. And still we can pull off a purely paper-based votes with 82 million people completely without any lines in front of the voting booths and results within two hours after the election.
- anonymouz 14y ago
  > Counting votes is perfectly scalable, if one in a thousand people volunteers to count votes it doesn't matter if your population is 1000 or one billion. Unless you're trying to bribe the counters/interfere with the counting ;).
- jusben1369 14y ago
  You are correct good Sir. Your error is to assume the US is a single country the way Germany is a single country. The US has some characteristics that best resemble Europe and some characteristics that resemble a single country. You'll get into trouble every time you try and put it into one bucket or the other.
  - skrause 14y ago
    Note that Germany is a federal republic with multiple states just like the USA, where each state has different voting laws. It just happened that our constitutional court declared that all current voting machines are inherently unsafe. This judgement applies to all states of the republic.
- Riesling 14y ago
  I just looked it up on wikipedia and they are not banned completely. Still, effectively they are, since the court said that > "verification of the result must be possible by the citizen reliably and without any specialist knowledge of the subject."
grecy 14y ago
> (1) We have > 300 M people. That's a huge population. It's hilarious when Americans use that as an excuse for things being sub-par in their country. I see it all the time for health care, roads, schools etc. Yes, your country has lots of people in it, but it also takes in an enormous amount of tax, and has enormous government agencies to organize this kind of thing. Everything should scale up appropriately, but you guys have no figured that out yet.
- danielrhodes 14y ago
  You are right. Countries scale up linearly just like websites do. How stupid of us to think otherwise.
  - grecy 14y ago
    I did not use the word linear. Obviously scaling is hard, but I would expect that's one of the things a well functioning, well funded government should take care of, much like how Facebook and Google manage to scale well.
    - wpietri 14y ago
      Your mistake is in thinking that Americans want a well-functioning, well-funded government. Some do, but a substantial swathe of America is currently, for one reason or another, opposed to that.
      - grecy 14y ago
        Right. So it has nothing to do with the size of the population, and everything to do with people not wanting to pay tax. So to summarize, it's hilarious when Americans use the large population excuse for having sub-par services.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - mrb 14y ago
matthewowen 14y ago
300m people is a complete red herring. That also means you have many more people available to process ballots / provide infrastructure.
- danielweber 14y ago
  If you use "number of issues that come up" as a measure of how bad things are, size is absolutely an issue. One-in-a-million errors will occur 300 times if everyone votes.

by pnathan 14y ago

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.

danielweber 14y ago
If you vote with paper, you don't worry at all if it's counted right. Note that this doesn't mean it's counted right: it just means you have no way to worry about it. Maybe election officials are debating whether that line for Joe is a mistake or not. Now the problems are seen immediately instead of unseen, which was one of the driving forces for people who didn't want to ever go through the hanging chad issue again. I'm certainly not saying computer voting is better than paper voting -- they each have their trade-offs. (I'd prefer paper ballots that voters can "self-scan" by a machine that is very conservative in what it accepts, but that's a whole separate discussion.)
- trhtrsh 14y ago
  An electronic voting machine may present an obvious error in the UI and ALSO may present a hidden error in pubishing the vote. So it's worse.
param 14y ago
Dear Sir, As an Indian I can testify that we actually have far more election abuse - people being blocked from entering a voting booth, vote boxes(still vote on paper) being stolen, voting booths set on fire... Of course, again, there is media acting as a watchdog, and a hope that the manipulation is statistically insignificant.
- masklinn 14y ago
  > vote boxes(still vote on paper) FWIW, most of the world votes on paper, and if history's anything to go by paper ballot is way more reliable than electronic, at least when it comes to auditability. I'm sure it's possible to design a secure and tamper-proof electronic voting system[0] with a great, useable interface... but nobody seems interested in doing that. [0] system, not machine, because you most likely want the machine recording votes and the machine tallying them to be fully separate.
- azharcs 14y ago
  I would like to disagree with Mr.Param who is either being a cynic or trying to be "me-too". India is aggressively moving away from paper-ballot voting to EVM's. In our last general elections, a million electronic voting machines (EVM's) were used which reduces vote-rigging, ballot capture etc. In maybe 5 years, we will be completely rid of paper-ballots. For further read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_voting_machines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_voting_machines India also has option called "None of the Above" as a voting option, which is extremely democratic.
  - param 14y ago
    All right, I have been living in the US for a while, and didn't know about the move to electronic voting. However, my point about there being FAR more abuse in India stands. Here are some references: Fatal attacks near polling booth - 2009 - http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123985213176424031.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123985213176424031.html Booth capturing "found primarily in India" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booth_capturing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booth_capturing intimidation on racial lines: http://uk.oneworld.net/article/view/162808/1/5847 http://uk.oneworld.net/article/view/162808/1/5847 You are plain kidding if you feel elections in India are anywhere close to being as good as US.
pnathan 14y ago
> http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=countries%20by%20population http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=countries%20by%20popula... this is a lot of people. I am sure that if we investigate the details of elections in India, Indonesia, and Brazil, we will find an array of fudged votes and issues. In other words, I am pretty sure that the error rate for the mix of remote/paper/electronic voting will hold pretty constant regardless of population size.
- felipeko 14y ago
  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.
jusben1369 14y ago
Somehow, given the context of this thread, I suspect you're realize this wasn't really a very productive counter ;-)

citricsquid 14y ago

> But it's very strange that it was "miscalibrated" to not select one particular candidate, no? :) The internet loves Obama. There are many stories of people that support Obama cheating the system (right now there's a popular story of someone admitting on Facebook to voting for Obama 4 times...) and that isn't on the front page of HN, when that is absolutely confirmed to be a misuse of the system. Everything that is a disadvantage for Obama is naturally going to get more attention, because most of the internet age that use sites like reddit and HN are the sort that want progress. I'll bet there are machines that have this problem (assuming this is not an isolated incident and his a software/hardware issue) that vote for Obama when Romney is clicked, but that won't be big news in this circle of news because who cares about Romney here? Edit: here you go, same problem that affects Romney votes on another machine http://www.cbs42.com/content/localnews/story/Voting-machines-switch-Romney-votes-to-Obama/m9dR8WDjbUKX8OFu4meIFQ.cspx http://www.cbs42.com/content/localnews/story/Voting-machines...

marshallp 14y ago
The republicans are the party of liars. Who is more likely to actually commit these crimes? Republicans. Even the 4 votes thing you came up with is probably republicans spreading lies.
- baltimore 14y ago
  Seriously? Why are you even here (HN)? This place does not suffer trolls lightly.
  - mkr-hn 14y ago
    HN loves trolls as long as they aren't lazy about it.
  - marshallp 14y ago
    What? Are you denying Romnesia, or the lies that led to the Iraq war. Or Nixon's party. Or that the military-industrial xomplex and big oil is allied with republicans. Or Peter Norvig's analysis of who you should vote for http://norvig.com/election-faq-2012.html http://norvig.com/election-faq-2012.html It's easy to call "troll" and try to sneakily shout out the other person. You should try some self-reflection if you're a republican. If you've got enough inquisitiveness to be on HN, apply that to deciphering what the republican party actually stands for.

tlrobinson 14y ago

Note the video didn't show him trying to select other candidates.

eloquence 14y ago
This. There have been similar reports of those trying to select Obama.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

skrause 14y ago

I never understand the population argument. Counting votes is perfectly scalable, if one in a thousand people volunteers to count votes it doesn't matter if your population is 1000 or one billion. In Germany voting machines have been banned completely with good reasons, because they're unsafe and easy to to hack. And still we can pull off a purely paper-based votes with 82 million people completely without any lines in front of the voting booths and results within two hours after the election.

anonymouz 14y ago
> Counting votes is perfectly scalable, if one in a thousand people volunteers to count votes it doesn't matter if your population is 1000 or one billion. Unless you're trying to bribe the counters/interfere with the counting ;).
jusben1369 14y ago
You are correct good Sir. Your error is to assume the US is a single country the way Germany is a single country. The US has some characteristics that best resemble Europe and some characteristics that resemble a single country. You'll get into trouble every time you try and put it into one bucket or the other.
- skrause 14y ago
  Note that Germany is a federal republic with multiple states just like the USA, where each state has different voting laws. It just happened that our constitutional court declared that all current voting machines are inherently unsafe. This judgement applies to all states of the republic.
Riesling 14y ago
I just looked it up on wikipedia and they are not banned completely. Still, effectively they are, since the court said that > "verification of the result must be possible by the citizen reliably and without any specialist knowledge of the subject."

grecy 14y ago

> (1) We have > 300 M people. That's a huge population. It's hilarious when Americans use that as an excuse for things being sub-par in their country. I see it all the time for health care, roads, schools etc. Yes, your country has lots of people in it, but it also takes in an enormous amount of tax, and has enormous government agencies to organize this kind of thing. Everything should scale up appropriately, but you guys have no figured that out yet.

danielrhodes 14y ago
You are right. Countries scale up linearly just like websites do. How stupid of us to think otherwise.
- grecy 14y ago
  I did not use the word linear. Obviously scaling is hard, but I would expect that's one of the things a well functioning, well funded government should take care of, much like how Facebook and Google manage to scale well.
  - wpietri 14y ago
    Your mistake is in thinking that Americans want a well-functioning, well-funded government. Some do, but a substantial swathe of America is currently, for one reason or another, opposed to that.
    - grecy 14y ago
      Right. So it has nothing to do with the size of the population, and everything to do with people not wanting to pay tax. So to summarize, it's hilarious when Americans use the large population excuse for having sub-par services.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- mrb 14y ago

matthewowen 14y ago

300m people is a complete red herring. That also means you have many more people available to process ballots / provide infrastructure.

danielweber 14y ago
If you use "number of issues that come up" as a measure of how bad things are, size is absolutely an issue. One-in-a-million errors will occur 300 times if everyone votes.