Holt's HR 811, A Deceptive Boondoggle -- 10 Blunders to Fix

[kster]

by Bruce O'Dell


SNIP...Many of my colleagues (perhaps more so, for those gaining financially by their involvement with electronic voting industry) seem to utterly miss the essential point. Computerized voting systems are actually national defense systems deserving a much higher standard of protection than conventional applications, such as mere banking software. Undetected widespread covert manipulation of computerized voting systems is the functional equivalent of invasion and occupation by a foreign power. In either case, the American people lose control of their destinies, perhaps permanently. Covert manipulation of voting systems could even be worse in one key way than mere invasion, since the "electoral coup" would appear to occur with the illusion of the manufactured consent of the governed, and there would be no "tanks in the street" to galvanize resistance.



SNIP...As socially-responsible professionals we must openly acknowledge the inherent limitations of our ability to ensure voting is as trustworthy as a critical national security system should be. We cannot and should not ask the public to simply trust the outcome of any testing and certification process, no matter how many "experts" say so.


SNIP...In fact, there is a fascinating study from 2001 (interestingly enough, published shortly before HAVA was enacted) which concluded that not only were hand-counted paper ballots the most accurate of all vote counting methods, measuring by residual vote rate, but that every single technological "innovation" of the last century - lever machines, punch cards, optical scan, DRE - actually measurably decreased the accuracy of the voting process. Their conclusion:

These results are a stark warning of how difficult it is to implement new voting technologies. People worked hard to develop these new technologies. Election officials carefully evaluated the systems, with increasing attentiveness over the last decade. The result: our best efforts applying computer technology have decreased the accuracy of elections, to the point where the true outcomes of many races are unknowable.



It will come as no surprise that some of my colleagues still question whether multiple citizens (each with competing political allegiances, and drawing upon the processing power of the one thousand trillion synapses in the massively-parallel neurocomputer we call a human brain) are collectively better able to interpret voter intent as marked on paper, as opposed to a "dumb" optical scanner. Of course, the people also have to count way up to 500 or so several times. Clearly, a job that calls for a machine.


http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_bruce_o__070221_holt_s_hr_811_a_dece.htm

He gives in a little in the last couple paragraphs , but a Great article nonetheless.

[rumpel]

1. I like it already

and I have only gotten to "hand-counted paper ballots the most accurate of all vote counting methods"

We have to see the 2001 report :evilgrin:

on edit:
here it is with several additional "notes"
http://www.cpsr.org/prevsite/publications/newsletters/issues/2001/Winter/nilsson.html

[eridani]

2. Hand counted ballots are not the most accurate

They are for a single race, but optical scanning beats it out with counting more than one race at a time.

[OnTheOtherHand]

3. that's not actually the 2001 report

Here it is: http://vote.caltech.edu/media/documents/wps/vtp_wp2.pdf

Bruce made it sound as if his quotation appears in the report, but it appears in the CPSR writer's write-up. Also, it appears that the CPSR writer was working from a preliminary version.

Looking at the report, one sees that optical scanners performed well, actually edging out hand-counted paper ballots by two of three measures (Table 2, page 10). DREs performed poorly, but narrowed the gap in 2000 (Table 3, page 11). Looking at more recent data, it appears that in 2004, precinct-count optical scanners and even DREs actually had lower residual vote rates than hand-counted paper ballots: http://www.umsl.edu/~kimballd/rtables.pdf at Table 1. I haven't seen figures for 2006 yet. Obviously the DRE residual vote rate in FL-13 was a humdinger.

EDIT TO ADD: And it's important to understand that residual votes aren't a good measure of how accurately various methods count votes. No one knows that. It seems that the error rates are usually pretty small with all methods; residual votes are mostly caused at the time of voting.

[papau]

5. I'd have no problem with optical scanners with mandatory 10% random audits n/t

n/t

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

4. "socially-responsible professionals"?

"As socially-responsible professionals"??

Always blow horn loudly in order to attract more attention.

Meanwhile, "socially responsible" professionals use rhetoric
like "boondoggle" and "deceptive" to as terms of endearment
towards lawmakers.

This helps - anti paper election officials and vendors, by
marginalizing the er movement.

[OnTheOtherHand]

6. actually, I can't tell whether Bruce wrote the headline

The article is characteristically thoughtful -- and his point when he refers to "socially responsible professionals" is that Shamos is waaaaaay overselling DRE security, which I think most observers other than Shamos would agree with. Even when I disagree with Bruce, I learn more than when I agree with most people. (I do wish he would correct and update his facts on residual votes: at this point, the idea that hand counts have been proven most accurate pretty much qualifies as an urban legend.)

But one way or another, Bruce allowed himself to be coopted by the Kill Holt! crowd when it came to titling the article. (And he signed that super-weird analysis about exit polls and stolen votes in 2006 -- the one that suggests in a footnote that the Democrats probably won the House vote by 23 percentage points. That was really disappointing.)