My election experience (rant)

[vienna]

Originally Posted by Platapus

What you are referring to is called a "null vote" i.e. a vote cast but not for any candidate. Null voting is a valid vote and can be important. ...

Here in California, the vast majority of voters don't understand the concept of a null vote. This may stem from voting policies in the distant past voiding an entire ballot if any one item on the ballot didn't get voted upon. The practice was intended to encourage (enforce) voters to vote on every item on the ballot, but the practice was eliminated some time back, although I can't recall whether it was stopped by court action or legislative action. The "None of the Above" Jerry Brown espoused was the only time it ever appeared on the ballot, AFAIK, and hasn't been raised seriously since. The belief at the time was both parties were soundly and publicly embarrassed neither could muster enough voter support to get their candidate/issue passed. For the voters, it was a chance to visibly express their dissatisfaction with the parties. The Null Vote may be there, but it becomes the "dirty little secret" the parties don't want voters to know about lest they male greater use of the ability. What I would have found interesring would have been if one of the parties' candidate/issue had come in first, follwoed by "None of the Above", and the other party in third. I wonder what the reaction of the third place party would have been to such a public shunning? ...

Originally Posted by Platapus

Ugh. I remember those days. It really sucked working the polls. We are lucky, we have our poll books on laptop computers and it makes the book keeping a lot easier. ..

Does your state still do it this way? If so, I hope that one day soon they will change and get laptops. It makes the process faster (voters like that), easier (election officers like that) and less error prone (SBE likes that).

<O>

[/QUOTE]

California has a multitude of poll practices and voting methods since voting administration is overseen on a county level and, thus, is open to the influence of county budgets, voter preferences, political party finagling, and other factors. Here, in Los Angeles, we still have the paper log books; I don't know about the res of the state. The County did try electronic voting around the 2004 election, but it seemed everyone, voters, political parties, political commentators, and anyone else involved were quite vocal in nixing the idea so, since then, we have stuck with mid-20th century methods. Shame, really; the electronic system was very easy to use and was very transparent...


<O>

[August]

Originally Posted by vienna

the electronic system was very easy to use and was very transparent...

A lot easier to game as well.

1 paper ballot vote = 1 hard copy of that vote to be reviewed/recounted if necessary. 1 electronic vote = No hard evidence no hard proof how the votes were actually cast.

[Platapus]

Originally Posted by August

A lot easier to game as well.

1 paper ballot vote = 1 hard copy of that vote to be reviewed/recounted if necessary. 1 electronic vote = No hard evidence no hard proof how the votes were actually cast.

I agree, what I was referring to was the electronic poll books where we check in voters.

I was very happy when Virginia got rid of the electronic ballot, just for the very reasons you mentioned.

[vienna]

Originally Posted by Platapus

I agree, what I was referring to was the electronic poll books where we check in voters.

I was very happy when Virginia got rid of the electronic ballot, just for the very reasons you mentioned.

I knew you were referring to the poll books and I do wish we had them electronically here in LA. I threw in the electronic balloting because I knew relatively few places have had the chance to try the systems out. I agree there is a high possibility of "gaming" electronic systems. Here, the system used did produce a hard copy printout of the ballots as cast and, in addition, the voter was presented with a final overview of the ballot just cast before it was finalized. The County stopped using the system due to some of the concerns about "gaming", but there was an additional concern about future use when reports leaked out about the votes in the being tabulated offshore, and IIRC, the company running the system was centered in italy...

To be honest, and realistic, about any current voting system other than wholly electronic, the possibility of "gaming" exists for any high volume voting system since all of those types of systems, at some point or another, depend on computer systems for the speedy and efficient tabulation of votes and generation of results. Those systems are also open to "gaming" and the possibility is really much overlooked. In order to "properly" "game" an election, you would only need to tamper with the computer system enough to switch enough votes to achieve a win margin large enough not to provoke a recount, but not large enough to raise suspicions...


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[August]

That's fine edge to walk especially given our polarized times, especially since the the Freedom of Information act lets those votes be recounted by anyone.

[Platapus]

Originally Posted by vienna

In order to "properly" "game" an election, you would only need to tamper with the computer system enough to switch enough votes to achieve a win margin large enough not to provoke a recount, but not large enough to raise suspicions...


<O>

That would be a lot harder to do than some may think.

Each paper ballot when scanned, at least in our machines, is time stamped. So in order to monkey withe tallies, it would be necessary to change the recording of the vote while the voting is in progress, before you know what the real vote is. This might work if the votes were tallied all at once.

Also, access to the voting machines would be a problem. They are kept locked up and specific internal parts are sealed. If one wished to monkey with the code, it would have to be done at the factory and that is before the code is inspected upon delivery.

Even assuming you could do this for one machine, the likely hood of any one machine's results having that strong of an effect on an election is slim. So in order to really have a chance of influencing an election, one would have to monkey with multiple machines.. many machines and that is for a State election. Thousands of machines would have to be altered to affect a national election and the chances of that happening are pretty slim.

It would be much more effective to spend the money on smear campaign tactics..... which is what the political parties do anyway.

There are double checks and safeguards that even I am unaware of concerning the machine in my precinct.

[vienna]

The true vulnerability is with the final tabulating computers; if they are connected to the Net for the purposes of data transmission, say, in a geographically large state like CA, they could be hackable; if the tabulators are connected in any way to an internal network which is itself connected to the Net, they could be hackable. Someone could alter the logarithms enough to affect the tally just enough to swing a vote without being noticeable and the deviations(s) would not be noticeable until a manual recount or audit is called for by some candidate or party. Remember the questionable 2000 election results in Florida; the exit polls in some of the heavily-DEM precincts showed a large majority of votes going to Gore, yet when the tally was released, the margin was either significantly smaller or Bush ended up beating Gore in the final tally. In some areas in Florida where there were heavily-DEM and heavily-Jewish voter populations anomalies such as uber-conservative Pat Buchanan score heavily where, prior to the election, he was even a blip on the radar. (I recall a neighbor of mine, whose father lived in Fl at the time, telling me his father was quite upset saying "What if I actually wound up voting for that Nazi Buchanan!"). Such "problems" with the numbers is what initiated the whole FL recount mess. There is still no definitive resolution to the whole matter, and there never will. But, the point is, unless you draw attention to tampering by making too evident, it is possible to finesse a tally to accomplish whatever is the goal for doing so. There may be all manner of safeguards for the actual pare ballots, but all bets are off once the ballots are scanned and the data disappears into the computer systems where any number of manipulations can take place, and, again, no one would really know unless the manipulation is more than casually obvious. It only takes something very simple to game even the most complex systems and safeguards. I once worked in a major national bank's data processing center from 1970-1973 and would often take a short cut in the building through the International Wire Transfer department. The first time I went through, the co-worker who was showing me the shortcut pointed out the wire transfer terminals and I remember commenting to him about the lack of security on the terminals even though we were in, by the standards of the time, a very, very secure building. About a month after I quit the bank, I was reading the paper and came across an article about an employee of the data center who had been arrested for wire fraud, among other charges. What he had done was to finesse the wire transfer system: due to the differences in foreign exchange rates, a lot of the transactions resulted in fractions of a cent being calculated. What the employee did was to have those fractions automatically deposited in a bank account in Europe. Since the bank was national and international bank, the number of transactions and fractions of cents were in the thousands and added up really quickly; anyone looking at the logs would just see what appeared to be a set of 'normal' wire transactions. The employee would have gone on undetected except he decided to cash in some of his ill-gotten gain; while on vacation in Europe, he withdraw a sizable amount of cash from the target account. Since going through customs in the USA with such a large amount of cash would raise red flags, he bought loose diamonds and tried to smuggle them in to the US. Unfortunately for him, he was a better embezzler than he was a smuggler; once caught, he confessed the crime and detailed how he had pulled off the theft to a very startled bank management. If had not tried to smuggle the diamonds, who knows how long his crime would have gone undetected. And, remember, the crime was committed at at time when computer systems were still being programmed by keypunch card and running on room-sized TOS mainframes. Given the great leaps in technology today, it is not too far-fetched to entertain the possibility the same sort of "finessing" might be done to an election system even if it were not fully electronic...


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[August]

Originally Posted by vienna

What he had done was to finesse the wire transfer system: due to the differences in foreign exchange rates, a lot of the transactions resulted in fractions of a cent being calculated. What the employee did was to have those fractions automatically deposited in a bank account in Europe.

Did he watch the movie Office Space?