Poll question: Hand Counted Paper Ballots: Yes or No or Other?

[In Truth We Trust]

Poll question: Poll question: Hand Counted Paper Ballots: Yes or No or Other?

[jobycom]

1. Other: People have been cheating with paper ballots long before there was evoting

Hand counting paper ballots will stop election fraud in the same way painting bullets red will stop firearm deaths.

What we need is a clear oversight system controlled by someone outside of the election process, with transparent processes at every step, and with double and triple oversight, so that someone is watching the watchers. With that, electronic voting can work just as well as paper ballots. Without it, hand-counted paper ballots are just as frightening as evoting.

[Dr.Phool]

2. I've never been hit by a red bullet before.

Just sayin'.

[In Truth We Trust]

3. Are serious? Seriously, are you serious? Do you realize how disingenuous your statements are?

Hand counted paper ballots are by their very nature transparent. Source code IS NOT TRANSPARENT!

Oh, and btw, we've done it successfully for CENTURIES!. Granted fraud has occurred but certainly not as easily and massively as that allowed by the use of source code. Fraud through hcpb's must require it be done at the precint level and naturally require many conspirators.

Your support of anything other than HCPB's is not worthy of a person concerned with democracy and transparency.

[jobycom]

4. Are serious? Seriously, are you serious? Do you realize how disingenuous your statements are?

See, good argument, right. :eyes:

My only response is my post above. You've said nothing to counter it, so until you do, I have no need to say more.

[In Truth We Trust]

6. I guess the word "transparency" is lost on you then. I can see I am wasting my time with you. Enjoy

the rest of your day.

[jobycom]

8. That's okay, the definition of "disingenuous" is lost on you..

Keep believing you are the only one who understands anything, it's much easier to win a debate that way. Walking away always proves you right, eh?

My original post stands. You haven't refuted it, weakened it, or even really addressed it. Until you do, everything else you say is weakened.

[In Truth We Trust]

9. My post #6 still applies. Nice try though.

[RaleighNCDUer]

10. You obviously completely misunderstand the problem with

electornic voting.

Of course, there has always been cheating and there will always be cheating. We don't have to make it easy for the cheaters, though.

The right line of code in a tabulator can alter the results, then erase itself so that there will be NO evidence of fraud for all those watchers to see. One techie inserts the code and changes tens of thousands of votes - sounds a little easier than altering, fraudulantly submitting, or losing tens of thousands of paper ballots.

I agree, there should be a federal elections bureaucracy, independent of any party, like the GAO, and elections should not fall under the purview of political appointees or party affiliated Secretaries of State, but that's only a partial solution -- civil servants can be bought or be partisan. Paper ballots hand counted by three people - one independent and one from each of the two major parties - would make the system as close to incorruptible as we are likely to get.

[Land Shark]

17. With e-voting, one person can do FAR MORE FRAUD than with paper (think Power of Email....)

so, paper ballots can not be just as bad as evoting

Yet it's true that there are cases of cheating with paper ballots. Whoa! But wait, think of these considerations:

1. The fact that we KNOW about the cases indicates that the evidentiary functions of the system operated. E-voting HAS NO APPRECIABLE EVIDENTIAL FUNCTION and a core problem is that we DON'T KNOW IF IT is a real election or a hack! So, citing examples of known fraud is a dicey thing if you want to thereby assess the risks of two general types of systems.

2 . If paper ballots are deliberately operated or negligently operated without proper checks and balances because corrupt elections officials WANT things to happen -- DON'T BLAME THAT ON THE PAPER, ok?

3. Truth is, the PRESSURE to cheat in an election comes from what's on the ballot, not from whether the ballot is paper or electronic. The type of voting system only controls what methods might be used to alter it, and what the evidence of any alterations will be, and its chances of being caught, reported and controlled.

THE ULTIMATE IRONY IS

We could have a long list of paper ballot "frauds" to feel bad about, then freely adopt electronic voting and never have evidence of fraud again, AND YET EVERY SINGLE ELECTION ON ELECTRONICS COULD IN FACT BE HACKED, IT'S JUST THAT WE'D HAVE NO EVIDENCE OF IT. Under these circumstances, we could still, ironically, have lots of people like the person in comment#1 above talking about how paper ballots were never perfect and we've had *fewer reports* of problems since adopting the secret electronic methods of vote counting. Such statements should run chills down the spine of every informed electronic voting activist.

[In Truth We Trust]

19. THE ULTIMATE IRONY. Well said Land Shark. It does in fact run chills down the spine.

[emlev]

27. " No problems reported" wiith e-voting always reminds me of...

a tiny newspaper article I read as a teenager about some containers of radioactive waste that were discovered to have holes in them. The article, on page somethingteen of the front section, assured the reader that "no radiation escaped." Maybe the material inside had the same weight and volume, but there's no way no radiation escaped.

This is why we talk about the importance of elections having "a basis for confidence," but just that voters are confident. People can feel confident about anything, but that doesn't make it safe.

[On the Road]

5. Politcal Machines Stole Elections

for many decades with hand-counted ballots. Hand counting is the method Stalin had in mind in his "who counts the vote" statement that everyone quotes. Jimmy Carter himself tracked down and stopped an attempt to steal hand-counted votes. What Ohio precincts had the biggest gap between exit polls and official resuls? The rural hand-counted ones. If you ask any three people to count a stack of 1,000 paper ballots, you'll get three different answers any time.

I have no idea why anyone familiar with the history of election fraud would be so in love with hand counting as opposed to other methods of handling ballots.

[In Truth We Trust]

7. Because it is the MOST transparent and therefore safest method of electoral integrity.See my post #3

[Febble]

12. Not necessarily

there are arguments that a good optical scanning protocol could be more transparent than hand-counts for a complex ballot.

[In Truth We Trust]

15. Does it involve source code? Yes it does so those "arguments" don't hold water.

[Febble]

24. Well, think about this:

What do we mean by "transparent"? Well, I would mean, and I expect you would mean, that we could watch the votes actually being counted, and check independently that they were being counted correctly. Yes?

With an optical scanner, you could do an initial count very quickly; you could then run the ballots through a different scanner, and check that the totals were at least close (there will always be some error in any counting system) and you could also subject the scanners to random checks, by which a manual count (conducted transparently) was used to check the totals reached by the machines.

With hand counting, and simple ballots e.g. one ballot per race, one race per count as we have in the UK, you can have reallytransparent counting. The public can actually watch the piles of ballots being sorted, and see whether one pile is growing bigger than another. So that's very transparent. Also we count in "constituencies" of 40,000 to 40,000 voters, so there is a big crowd watching, and TV cameras, and bipartisan scrutineers walking around, checking the count. The whole thing starts immediately after polls close and is finished in a few hours, and if the candidates aren't happy, they do it again.

But with hand-counting American ballots, what would you do? If you do it at the precinct, you are never going to get the oversight we have in the UK. And even if you did, the actual counting would be much less visible - no stacking ballots into piles, one for each candidate. You've got tens of races on each ballot. You'd be watching people add up columns, watching their lips move, maybe, watching them check each other's work perhaps. And it would take days, not hours - who's going to be watching this "transparent" process? You'd certainly need random audits on top of the hand count. And in fact, the counting would be done by "secret source code" - the code inside the head of each teller.

I'm all for transparent counting. I'm just not convinced that hand-counting complex ballots at precinct level (which is the only suggestion I've seen made) is going to be transparent enough to prevent either error and fraud, and I think other methods, including optical scanning, are possibly potentially better.

HCPB are no panacea for election corruption. Look at Ukraine.

[RaleighNCDUer]

11. biggest gap between exit polls and official resuls? The rural hand-counted ones.

Please prove support for this allegation. Everything I have seen has said just the opposite - that the exit polls were most accurate where there were no DREs.

[OnTheOtherHand]

13. I don't think either of those is right

I don't think there were any hand-count counties in Ohio at all. One of the precincts with a large exit poll discrepancy was in Cincinnati, and it used punch cards.

Nationwide, hand-count precincts had the lowest mean Within Precinct Error, but at least three of the five urban hand-count precincts had double-digit errors. There's no evidence that hand counting per se is correlated with WPE. The largest WPEs were in lever-machine precincts.

[In Truth We Trust]

14. Thank you. well said. You are correct re exit polls and source code. Bet you don't see any response

which factually supports his post.

[On the Road]

16. I Remember It from Elizabeth Liddle's Statistical Analysis

The "US Count Vote" people had claimed that the pattern of deviation between exit polls and official vote did not support an explanation by response variables. Liddle showed that was incorrect, and that more heavily partisan precincts in either political direction tended to minimize response variables. The discussion of the rural Republican precincts, most of which were hand-counted, was part of that discussion.

[In Truth We Trust]

18. As stated in post #13 OnTheOtherHand said and I recollect as well that Ohio did NOT have hcpb's in

any counties. Ohio used one form of source code or another statewide.

[OnTheOtherHand]

20. your broader point is being lost, I think

Sure, there was the back-and-forth debate about "Republican strongholds." It wasn't really a debate about urban/rural or HCPB/other.

As I said, rural HCPB precincts had small average Within Precinct Errors -- so did rural punch cards. In fact, I think all the voting technologies had indistinguishably small average WPEs in rural areas. Probably because it's easier to conduct an exit poll in a rural area.

I agree with you that HCPBs are no panacea, far from it.

EDIT TO ADD: At the risk of belaboring the obvious, anyone who could pose the "poll question" here obviously isn't interested in what anyone else thinks, anyway.

[In Truth We Trust]

21. "Obviously", how so? I have arrived at my opinion frankly from having listened and read the opinions

and researched the facts as offered from many people and multiple quarters. Do not presume to know what I am interested in and I will refrain from doing the same where you are concerned.

[OnTheOtherHand]

22. well, stop asking absurdly loaded questions

You may be interested in other people's opinions in other contexts, but these response categories certainly don't reflect such an intention. Sorry if I offended you by stating the obvious.

[In Truth We Trust]

23. I understand and agree that the response categories are to say the least limited. I would think

that the message was clear in the original context. A simple poll with three options on of which of course was a throw away. The other two were there to impress my desire for hcpb's and in contrast the result if we have no hcpb's. It is/was silly but I wanted to continue to lobby for the right to a transparent electoral process where my vote is concerned.

[OnTheOtherHand]

32. rather well said: you used a poll to continue to lobby

The subject header gave the misleading impression that people might have the opportunity to express their opinions, but you designed the poll so that they could only express yours. That's your privilege, but I can't imagine why you should take offense at my conclusion.

My considered opinion is that a choice between "hand counted paper ballots now" and "fascism forever" is a specious choice. Your opinion may be equally considered, but you sure aren't expressing it in a way that is likely to win converts, IMHO. And given that you think the stakes are so high, I should think that would be a serious concern for you.

[In Truth We Trust]

33. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me my sin's. In the future I will decist from expres

sing my First Amendment right to communicate an opinion; I will then censor my desire for transparent elections- NOT.

[Febble]

34. Of course you should express your opinions!

It's just that on a discussion board, it's sometimes difficult to know when a thread is an invitation to cheer or an invitation to debate. And when a subject seems worth debating, it can be a bit disappointing to realise that one was only given the opportunity to cheer.

Or not.

BTW - did you read my post on the exit poll thing? It really was not true that exit poll discrepancies were worst in precincts with DREs.

[OnTheOtherHand]

37. it's not a matter of sin, it's a matter of effect

I can tell you something you may not know about the effects of your actions. You can do anything you want with that information.

[In Truth We Trust]

38. Actually not so. I designed it witrh three options and you could always present your own opinion as

you are doing now. The claim that it supports only my opinion is false. To say I would favor anything other than hcpb's as indicated in the second choice I provided is simply ludicrous.

As far as the options and argument being "specious", I would completely disagree. To carry your argument to it's logical conclusion then you would have me understand that repeating the same claim in the same manner is not effective. I disagree. If I am hungry, I would continue to say "I am hungry". It gets the message across whether you agree or disagree.

Let's change the subject slightly and allow me this one question please. Do you support the use of source code at the ballot box? Before you answer please consider all the facts. Fact's that include the inability to truly audit; randomly or not considering the beast if you will. Other facts are that most states have laws that defeat the transparency, integrity o0f any true audit.

I would encourage support for a Constitutional amendment requiring HCPB's; would you support such an amendment?

[OnTheOtherHand]

41. sigh

Sure, you continue to get your message across.

If you aren't capable of arguing at least three or four positions on this issue by now, there is no way on earth I would be able to help.

[troubleinwinter]

30. "I have arrived at my opinion"

That has been unavoidably clear for quite some time.

[In Truth We Trust]

35. Good! I am glad for the clarity. Btw, I must admit your response was funny. Thanks for the yuk yuk.

[Febble]

26. Well, it isn't true.

I actually analysed the data myself, so I know it isn't true. It is also possible to infer that it is not true from the Edison-Mitofsky report, but I did some further analysis.

There were very few HCPB precincts in the exit polls (about 40) and they were almost exclusively in rural areas. Generally, the exit poll discrepancy was lower anyway in rural areas, so it was important to compare like with like. When precincts in rural areas, or in small towns, or in suburban areas were compared, the discrepancy in precincts with HCPB was not significantly different to that in precincts using any technology. However, in precincts serving larger urban areas (where there were no paper ballot precincts anyway), the biggest discrepancies were in precincts using levers and punchcards. Precincts using digital technology (DRES and optical scanners) had significantly smaller discrepancies.

[hunter]

25. Do you want to be the lunatic in the lobby? Yes or no?

I'm sorry sir, Ms. Election Official isn't in her office.

(Yep, she snuck out the back entrance when she saw you coming...)

Paper ballots yes. These are very auditable and recountable, even when the first count is a machine count.

The task is to make this counting transparent, and the auditing and recount procedures solid.

At the present time, with current law, this is not the case.

Rightfully or wrongfully, the prospect of hand counting ballots boggles the minds of most election officials, especially in places with very complex ballots. They simply can't imagine it.

[In Truth We Trust]

36. First they ignore you, then they attack you......

So now it is lunacy to advocate for hand counted paper ballots? You do know that we have used that method for CENTURIES don't you? It is being used quite efficiently NOW in multiple progressive democratic countries. Thet too have multiple races and issues being contested. I smell red herring.

[hunter]

39. These machines were sold to election officials as a way of making their jobs easier.

It's as simple as that, the vendors claimed it would be Plug'n Play.

Now we have to convince these same election officials that their great effort was for naught -- that they were sold a dangerous toy. This takes some diplomacy. When you tell them that their shiny new toy is crap they don't want to hear it.

You aren't going to catch me out on the "First they ignore you..." stuff. I'm a flaming social justice radical environmentalist pacifist unionist who carries a rainbow flag for gay rights.

I just don't happen to believe that Hand Counted Paper Ballots are the one and only solution to this problem. Hand Countable Paper Ballots yes, because any vote that goes invisible and electronic is inauditable. But votes can be counted mechanically with a great deal of transparency and reliability if audit and recount procedures are solid. These very same audit and recount procedures are also necessary for hand counted ballots.

I think it is very likely that some HCPB supporters are delibrately making smoke to obscure the real issues. They are sort of like the mask wearing idiots you see at environmental and peace rallies, like WTF? this isn't a free country or something.

It's not a free country, but if people are not willing to back up their own beliefs, things will only get worse. Furthermore, I'm not going to run with any crowd I believe is heading in the wrong direction. I believe this Hand Counted Paper Ballot stuff is the wrong direction.

In California, for now, it looks as if people are growing increasingly disatisfied with these machines, and are choosing instead to apply for absentee ballots, and then bringing those paper ballots to the polling places. County officials in some places have noticed this trend and are actively trying to discourage it.

Overall I think people dislike using computers when they don't have to. Rather than making voting "fun" people see these machines as an irritation that makes the lines in the polling places longer. Unless you are handicapped in some way, marking a paper ballot is always more straightforward than poking around some damned machine. Here in California we can probably kill these machines on that point alone.

There's no red herring on me, so maybe you'd better check your own pockets.

[In Truth We Trust]

40. Because election officials made an unwise decision we should be sensitive to their feelings??? And

thus temper the debate and thereby placate the lowest common denominator? That makes a whole lot of sense. Would you then argue that we shouldn't demand a pull out of Iraq because Bush** and a complicit Congress would be offended?

I suggest you familiarize yourself with state election laws which do not allow for recounts unless there is a margin of victory of 1% or less. By its very nature source code can be manipulated to disguise fraWd completely. Zero evidence of it. So an "audit" would serve only to confirm the so called "results".

You write the following statement: "I think it is very likely that some HCPB supporters are delibrately making smoke to obscure the real issues. They are sort of like the mask wearing idiots you see at environmental and peace rallies, like WTF? this isn't a free country or something". Let me retrurn the "WTF" for you on that. WTF???

[hunter]

42. Wow, more noise, no meat.

How do you propose to change those state laws that do not provide for adequate audits?

HCPB isn't going to do it as a rallying cry in a nation where election workers are walking away in utter disgust.

This is America where it's hard enough to get a good hearted retired people to sit there and check your name against the roster. There aren't enough people to hand count your paper ballot because to many of us would rather be at home watching television.

Yeah, it's come to that. Without technology a nation dies, and even with a good honest technology, things are looking pretty damned grim.

Send me a PM if you want to, I'll happily discuss things in private that I don't post in public. There are shitloads of WTF? concerning these issues. I'm not going to be played any more, how about you?

[Kurovski]

28. I enjoy this humor break. I'm voting against "evil"!

:-) F'em if they can't take a joke, as someone keeps saying to me.

[kster]

29. AS SEEN ON "Internet" TV, YOU TOO CAN HAND COUNT THE PAPER BALLOTS

Would you rather Hand your ballot over to these people, for counting?

://www.democracyfornewhampshire.com/node/view/2648%20

Or would you rather hand your ballot over to Diebold, ES&S and Sequioa for counting?

Watch the video, then you decide.


HAND COUNTED PAPER BALLOTS!!!!!!!!!

KICK N RECOMMEDED!!!!!!!!!!!!!



:patriot:

[kster]

31. k...nt

[hunter]

43. Heh...nt.

:P