The computer voting revolution is already crappy, buggy, and obsolete
Six days after Memphis voters went to the polls last October to elect a mayor and other city officials, a local computer programmer named Bennie Smith sat on his couch after work to catch up on e-mail.
The vote had gone off about as well as elections usually do in Memphis, which means not well at all. The proceedings were full of the technical mishaps that have plagued Shelby County, where Memphis is the seat, since officials switched to electronic voting machines in 2006. Servers froze, and the results were hours late. But experts at the county election commission assured both candidates and voters that the problems were minor and the final tabulation wasnt affected.
That story might have held up if Smith, a financial software developer and church organist, hadnt been conducting an election night experiment. The precinct, No. 77-01, is a Democratic stronghold and has one of the largest concentrations of African American voters in a city known for racially fractured politics. According to the tape, 546 people had cast ballots.
When he got an e-mail a week later with Shelby Countys first breakdown of each precincts voting, he ran down the list to the one precinct where he knew the tally for sure. The count for Unity Christian showed only 330 votes. Forty percent of the votes had disappeared.
Shelby County uses a GEMS tabulator for Global Election Management System which is a personal computer installed with Diebold software that sits in a windowless room in the countys election headquarters. There was no indication from the technician running Shelby Countys GEMS tabulator that any voting machine hadnt checked in or that any votes had gone missing. Yet as county technicians followed up on the evidence from Smiths poll-tape photo, they discovered more votes that never made it into the election night count, all from precincts with large concentrations of black voters.
Multiple lawsuits in Shelby County over the past 10 years have alleged that voting machines and computerized tabulators have been used to steal or suppress votes deepening the distrust of a system some locals see as stacked against them.
For the members of Congress, who in 2002 provided almost $4 billion to modernize voting technology through the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA Congresss response to Bush v. Gore this probably wasnt the result they had in mind. But voting by computer has been a technological answer in search of a problem. Those World War II-era pull-lever voting machines may not have been the most elegant of contraptions; but they were easy to use and didnt crash. Georgia, which in 2002 set out to be an early national model for the transition to computerized voting, shows the unintended consequences. It spent $54 million in HAVA funding to buy 20,000 touchscreen voting machines from Diebold. Today, to support the older Windows 2000 operating system, the state had to hire a contractor to custom-build 100 servers which, of course, are more vulnerable to hacking because they can no longer get current security updates.
By 2006 every state but New York had dumped their pull-lever and punch-card machines in favor of computerized voting. The voting tech vendors rushed systems to market, often without adequate testing. California declared almost all of the electronic voting machines in the state unfit for use in 2007 for failing basic security tests. San Diego County put its decertified machines in storage and has been paying the bill to warehouse them ever since: No one wants to buy them, and county rules prohibit throwing millions of dollars worth of machines in the trash bin.
Mark Earley, an election official in Tallahassee during the 2000 Florida recount, says the competition solved the revenue problem by focusing less on making equipment and more on long-term contracts. It was an enhancement of the old razors-and-blades strategy: Sell the razors cheap and make money on the blades, and make even more money by making the razors so hard to use that customers pay you to give them a shave.
At: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-voting-technology/
Avalon Sparks
(2,565 posts)How do other countries handle their own elections? That's something I'm going to look into.
forest444
(5,902 posts)A Dutch investigation in 2006 found that electronic voting machines emitted radio signals that anyone could use to peek at a voters' choices from a distance of up to several dozen yards. Specialists recently discovered the same problem in Argentina, where the new, right-wing regime has made switching to electronic voting a top priority before the next mid-terms in October 2017 (elections they are projected to lose). Electronic voting/tabulation has already been discontinued in among others California, Florida, Germany, and Ireland - in each case after the likelihood of fraud was proven in multiple studies and scenarios, and after much resistance.
Electronic voting cheerleaders often cite the fact that India, the world's largest democracy, has used electronic voting/tabulation for 15 years. But in fact they've had nothing but problems with those, and numerous studies have shown they can be tampered with with a mere mobile phone. The Indian Supreme Court, despite huge pressure from their government, mandated in 2011 hat they emit a paper trail in every use.
That's a only a small sampling; I'm sure you'll dig up a lot more by looking into this yourself, Avalon Sparks.
Avalon Sparks
(2,565 posts)I will, haven't trusted the machines since Florida/Bush.
forest444
(5,902 posts)I mean, hell, it's only our democracy we're talking about here.
You make a crime profitable, it's said, and you make it inevitable.
Buckeye_Democrat
(14,853 posts)Walden "Wally" O'Dell, the chairman of the board and chief executive of Diebold. For years, O'Dell has given generously to Republican candidates.
forest444
(5,902 posts)Wally O'Dell , ironically, gave us the closest thing we may ever see to a smoking gun as to the real objectives of those pushing electronic voting (particuarly electronic tabulation, where the real shenanigans can take place).
LisaQuinto
(1 post)I cannot get the rest of the article because Bloomberg blocks the article unless i subscribe to a hefty subscription amount.
I have tried to no avail to circumvent this "subscribe & then read". This is an important article and pertinent to the election in three months.
Could you please share the entire article here?
Thank you.