My personal feeling is that any state official who awarded a contract to a voting machine supplier for a system that provided no audit trail or means of verification of the vote should be sacked for incompetence.

...over this side of the Atlantic, ballots have to tally: in one council constituency a ballot box was lost (well, temporarily mislaid) and that was front page news in the local paper.

I voted. Proves your point doesn't it? ;D

I cast the second ballot on this issue.  So far, it's unanimous. 

It's crucial to resolve this issue for the good of the republic, not that the republic is going to last through the second reign of Emporer George!
:o

I find it interesting that so far we haven't heard from our Conservative contingency.




Cat

I find it interesting that so far we haven't heard from our Conservative contingency.




Cat

Oh, I think you've got a pretty good idea what they're going to say!
::)

I work in the IT industry and we'd NEVER think of designing a system without audit trails, it's standard practice.
Make you wonder about the contracting process whereby someone would allow this to happen.

As an aside I once voted in a municipal election where electronic machines were used.
We had a touch screen that had your candidates etc and it produced a paper ballot that you could verify.  This ballot was read by an optical reader.  This allowed for almost instantaneous results when the polls closed since the reader could tally the votes that quickly and there was a paper trail 'just in case'.

It's ridiculous >:(

I work in the IT industry and we'd NEVER think of designing a system without audit trails, it's standard practice.
Make you wonder about the contracting process whereby someone would allow this to happen.

My feelings precisely... it's as though the system were designed with the intention of falsifying the results.  But of course that could *never* happen...


...could it?

(brief BSP: Hackety Hack - all about this sort of thing :))

I work in the IT industry and we'd NEVER think of designing a system without audit trails, it's standard practice.
Make you wonder about the contracting process whereby someone would allow this to happen.

As an aside I once voted in a municipal election where electronic machines were used.
We had a touch screen that had your candidates etc and it produced a paper ballot that you could verify.  This ballot was read by an optical reader.  This allowed for almost instantaneous results when the polls closed since the reader could tally the votes that quickly and there was a paper trail 'just in case'.


Two centuries as neighbours, and we can't take ANY hints from Canada??? Why aren't voting methods standardised across the country? We can do better than this.

Standardized voting machines are a must, as is a verifiable paper trail.  And I do believe that the intent was (and is) to cheat.

I've done a bit more thinking... a voting machine should comprise two parts: one that you cast your vote on, and then prints a bit of paper with how you voted; the other has an optical scanner which reads the paper and displays a confirmation screen.  The trick is that these two systems should be written by separate companies, their votes correlated and counted separately, then the totals compared... and if they're out by more than, say, one vote, then the paper records are checked.

...I'd also get rid of any "commercial in confidence" crap for electoral systems: they should use open source code only, and be rigorously checked beforehand so no last-minute software upgrades which could contain anything.

Having said that, what's the chance of a change?  The people who have power at the moment are the ones who benefit from the system being skewed...

Having said that, what's the chance of a change?  The people who have power at the moment are the ones who benefit from the system being skewed...


When the realization dawns on them that what can be used to steal my vote, today, can just as easily be used to steal their votes, tomorrow -- then we'll get an omnipartisan cry for change... and not until.

Mel.

 

That's what I'd like to know...why is it that I vote with a punch card, RnRF had to fill in the circle, someone else had the touchscreen...it's a joke.  Just heard that my neighbor had 2 ballots stuck together when she voted...great election judges we have here :P


Get this, I had to "complete the arrow pointing to my candidate." It was simple but ridiculous.

Get this, I had to "complete the arrow pointing to my candidate." It was simple but ridiculous.



We have had those. This time we just had to fill in the little bubble. It reminded me of those standardized test we had to take in school.



Cat

Why not just a plain old peice of paper, a box beside the candidate/party/question, a pencil and make an x.
Low tech, easliy understandable, easy to count, cheap....seems to work here, we've had hurricanes, snowstorms etc yet the election goes off without any hitches and a winner is usually declared the same night.  Only if there's a recount (actual paper ballots again) do we have delays.