Florida Elections

[varjohaltia]

I was driving home yesterday, and listened to this story on NPR.

That's when I heard this:

Later at his office, Merriman says he had to reorganize the system.

"One of the lessons that we learned — which is critical to paper ballots — is that you have to treat these ballots like they're evidence," he says.

This means giving the ballots a strict chain of custody from start to finish. But that's only one problem with optically scanned paper ballots — a voting system that for the first time this year will be used by most Americans.

I still can't wrap my brain around this. There are / were precincts in this country where ballots AREN'T treated with a secure chain of custody? Seems to me that hanging chad was the least of their problems...

Comments

[sakurakurakura.livejournal.com]

why the hell can't there be online voting?! i can file my goddamned taxes online, i can apply for a mortgage a car a credit card a DAMNED BANK ACCOUNT- WHY THE HELL CAN'T THERE BE ONLINE VOTING. D:<

[varjohaltia.livejournal.com]

There's no real technical reason.
There IS a user interface reason -- a system that allows both for anonymous voting and guarantees that only registered voters can vote, and only with one vote, ends up being a bit more involved.
Here's an overview from 1996 (http://www.acm.org/crossroads/xrds2-4/voting.html) and Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems).
The one dilemma is that in any system in which the voter can check to see that their vote was correctly tallied, intimidation and vote-buying can become a problem that needs to be somehow addressed. (Only allowing a person to check their vote in a private booth etc. likely could get around it.)
Bottom line is that the political and popular understanding of the technology concepts and will to implement this doesn't exist.

[sakurakurakura.livejournal.com]

There's always a possibility for bote buying no matter what the system, though. Intimidation-wise, there's that too, ESPECIALLY in this election right now. (I think that problem really stems back to people putting stickers and signs up for their candidate-- they open themselves up to it in that respect.)
The anonymous thing I can see would be hard to accomplish, but wouldn't only allowing registerd voters to vote be as simple as requiring them to input their ss # or something equally unique? I mean, I can go to the GA SOS website to see I'm actually registered to vote, surely that wouldn't be hard to implement into the actual voting process. And even still, if people were allowed to GO BACK and look at what they voted for, it would ease the process of recounts, don't you think? You could show your receipt and prove you voted this way.
(SO F-OFF ANONYMOUS VOTING D:

[varjohaltia.livejournal.com]

Well, I think the SS# is pretty lousy, as you can steal other people's numbers and vote as them, and it's not really anonymous, and it has no Hamming distance / error tolerance against typos etc. The same thing can be accomplished in various ways, though, so it's not that big of a deal and more of an administrative hassle. As long as people spell their names differently and have different data in the DMV vs. SS vs. IRS vs. whatever databases the general dirtiness of voter data is a perhaps bigger problem. Still, a well-designed system would make it much harder for someone to typo your name and you finding out later that the name on your voter registration doesn't match your name on your DL. Regardless, the first step has to be a way to vet the voters beforehand and making sure only eligible voters can vote, and that they can vote only once.
Intimidation and vote buying is always a problem, but if there's no way for the intimidator or vote-buyer to check that you really did what you were told, it lessens the impact. Sure, I'll take $100 to vote for Nader, but I can then proceed to vote whichever way I want because the person giving me money has no way to check what I really did.
If you can go back later and check that your votes were counted correctly, the intimidator or vote-buyer can look over your shoulder and make sure you did what you were supposed to. You can of course get around this by only being able to check your vote in a controlled environment where an officer can make sure nobody's following you or making you take pictures of the screen or such.

[kaote.livejournal.com]

Online Votes! (http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/3259/index.html)

OK, I'll go away now. ^.^

[varjohaltia.livejournal.com]

Bad! Bad Pun!

[kemono-art.livejournal.com]

I heard that same story as I was headed to class. This also, to me, seemed like a no-brainer, as far as how to work with election ballots. But then, Brevard county has been using optical scan ballots for as long as I've been voting (1990's).