At 11:33 06/12/00 -0500, Mark Hill wrote:
<clip>
>If a simplified "card reader" were provided at each polling station each
>user could slide his card into the reader and verify his vote within
>seconds.
>This could be a simple device that mimics the current Votomatic, but with a
>light source below the card. A light would shine through each punched hole,
>lighting up a small indicator next to a candidates name. The voter could
>turn each page as he does in the Votomatic and quickly verify his
>selections.
<clip>

Since we are looking at this problem from an industrial automation perspective, I will answer the above with "Repeatability and
Reproducability". I'm sure that almost everyone on this list has had to deal with this issue at work. If with a typical machine the chances of achieving perfect R&R are virtually nill, what is the probability of getting two different machines (of different designs even) to correlate perfectly? You haven't introduced a solution, you've just introduced another problem. "You
can't inspect quality into a product" applies in this case as well.


Walt Boyes wrote:
<clip>
>The biggest undiscussed problem with this election isn't the technical end.
>The real issue is the identification of unauthorized voters. There are some
>simple technical solutions to this issue, as well, but for one major
>problem. The databases that must be used to verify who is and who is not a
>legal voter are not being permitted to be used.
<clip>
>But there is no "controlling legal authority"
>requiring that the databases for felons, for illegal aliens, for death
>certificates, for birth certificates be used to determine eligibility of
>voters.

That is kind of interesting, because the biggest story along this line in our election was that an election official in the province of
British Columbia didn't let a girl vote just because she wasn't on the voter's list and didn't have ID that indicated she was a resident of that
riding as she had only recently moved back there. However, under our election laws she should have been allowed to vote because an acquaintance (her father) was there to vouch for her being a resident.
What would your system have done in this case? It would simply have repeated the same error that the election official made. If you go too far overboard in trying to exclude invalid voters, the error in your system will also exclude too many valid voters.
All these databases you mentioned have errors of their own. If you combine them together, all I think you will turn up is just how big of a mess they are in. If we are going to compare election systems to industrial processes, then you need to imagine how you are going to build flexibility into it and to allow for the unforseen.


Ralph Mackiewicz wrote:
<clip>
>The basic problem with punch cards seems to be that it is
>too easy to use improperly leaving the results ambiguous
<clip>
>Regardless of the specific system, is it really possible to come up with a
>system that can count votes to an accuracy of 0.000001% ? This is the
>accuracy required for a national popular election (1 in 100,000,000) in
>the US.
<clip>

If the errors are random, there is no significant effect on the outcome. The problem arises when the errors are systematic, i.e. a number of defective machines or ballots in one or more sensitive areas. Does anyone ever apply any of the standard SPC techniques to verify the functioning of the voting equipment? If I can't haul a machine out of a warehouse and put it into production of auto parts without doing an R&R study, why wouldn't this apply to voting machines? It may not be just the hardware that is
antiquated.

>The only reason that there is such a fuss is that the vote was a statistical
>dead heat and the resolution of a dead heat in the US constitution doesn't
>involve a direct public vote. Some people seem to have a problem with that.

To continue the industrial analogy, the process is not very robust. The system tends to magnify errors or perturbations rather than supress them. Perhaps what you really need is a constitutional monarchy with a prime minister chosen from the party with the most seats in parliament.... (ha-ha!).

But seriously, no one has really explained just why these machines are necessary in the first place. Plenty of countries get along quite nicely without them. Other people have mentioned that these machines are so old because no one feels its worth spending money on equipment that gets used so seldom. So why not just toss them out and count the ballots by hand? Where is the return on investment here?


**********************
Michael Griffin
London, Ont. Canada
[email protected]
**********************

 

I thought the laws were written to allow hand counts when needed. How do you _hand_ count a fully electronic voting system? These laws appear to require a hard copy input of some kind. When we do our design spec we'll have to include this.

Ed

Speaking for me, not for Starbucks. . .

 

Forgive my ignorance of US election procedures, but I thought that requiring voters to register solved that problem. Please enlighten me. Here in Canada anyone with two pieces of identification
(an electricity bill could be one) can register to vote right up to and including election day. Lots of room for problems, but it leaves the door
open for wider use of computers.

Computer results would appear to be safe as long as there was also paper as a backup.

Bob Pawley

 

The necessity of a hi-tech election system is two fold;
(I) To prevent fraudulent identification of individuals. Punch cards, bar coded cards all are fine but they are prone to be forged easily and it's happening in many places. As a result someone else is voting instead of another person. So finger-print detection has been suggested as one of the foolproof methods. It has been pointed out that in some federal governed countries people won't like finger-prints to be recorded. But in many countries LTI (left thumb impression) is validated as a legal proof and it's used in places of signatures in documents and in some cases it is mandatory.
So why to object finger-print detection? Anyway that's not the point of discussion. I would just say in such cases some other means may be adopted
as image processing or something better. But definitely the detection system in such cases has to be an intelligent software so that it detects the changes in an individual's characteristics with age. The whole idea is that to prevent fraudulence it's better to detect any feature of an individual which cannot be forged and finger-print is one of them.
As regards the details of an individual getting revealed i.e. who has voted whom can easily be prevented. There will be a dedicated system which will check authentication and just enables the voting machine ( a computer with
touch-screen). Now the vote is recorded and since there's no provision of any data flow from the dedicated system to the voting machine the details
cannot be revealed.

(II) Ballot paper voting can easily be rigged. Oppositions go on a rampage, capture voting booths, stamp ballot papers and finally also capture ballot boxes. So to prevent such happenings it's better to get the votes recorded
on the voting machine which is enabled after proper authentication.
Though I agree the initial cost will be high but imagine the investment in a single election and thereafter repolling in several places. Still it doesn't give you a totally fair election.

I would like to discuss some other points which has been pointed out.
To make the system on-line there is indeed a possibility of getting hacked but if it is put on a private net it will be less prone to getting hacked. Still if it is felt there can be problem then throughout the voting session
it is not necessary to physically connect the voting machine to internet. Each area will have it's local database and at the end of the day even
counting will be done locally (in the PC) and for a few minutes it can be connected to private net to dump the results.
In order to make an individual sure that his/her vote has been accepted, after making selection, a box will pop up for a few seconds on the screen showing the symbol of his/her choice and thereby confirming that it has been recorded.
So I feel this hi-tech system will surely provide us with a fairer election system.

Pradeep Chatterjee
M-30/7,
TELCO Colony,
Jamshedpur-831004 (India)
Email: [email protected]
Ph:91-0657-487549 (R)

 

Repeatability and Reproducability are not major factors here, as we only need to have a single ballot repeat its count twice (one for the voter, once for the election board). And if the first one isn't accurate, it's tossed by the voter.

As for ROI, I've heard of numbers of on the order of half a million dollars to do the hand recounts (made "necessary" because the reading machine wasn't programmed to detect what some voters intended, and some (actually all) voters didn't know what the machine would read.

But your comment does raise an issue re: R&R. Why did the vote count change between the two machine counts? If it was just hanging chads falling off between counts, that's OK, because having the voter read his his card before leaving the poll would diminish the likelyhood of hanging chads. (I acknowledge that a chad could hang, be clear for the voter, but wind up blocking for the tabulator. But statistically, that should happen in equal proportion to the voters for each candidate, and cancel eachother out). If, however, the current tabulators are not 100.0000% accurate, then they need to be improved or eliminated.

 

Zone alarm tells you the IP address the probe was made from and the type of service request it is (PING, FTP, HTTP, etc.). In the 3 days that I've
had this running on my @Home cable modem I've seen probably 15 probes. About half are pings and the remainder split between NetBIOS name request and FTP attempted logins with a few HTTP requests. The latter could just be bots I suppose. Its hard to tell if these are "serious hackers" looking for places to put trojan horses or just some kid playing with hacking tools. I certainly don't want to be visible to either of these types. ZoneAlarm is free for personal use but there is a modest fee to use it in a business. I'm buying one for my work laptop for when I travel.

Regards,
Ralph Mackiewicz
SISCO, Inc.

 

>no one has really explained just why these machines
>are necessary in the first place. Plenty of countries
>get along quite nicely without them.

It is my understanding (not my experience) that many other countries limit the election to only one or a few races. We had 30+ officials to put in office in my precinct/district/county combination. Perhaps if we Americans would agree to hold a national election to select officials for only the 2 or 3 open national offices, then a hand count would be reasonable.

 

There is no technology solution for this problem. Its a political problem and will have to be solved that way.

Voter registration and identification are the most critical needs, the voting means is a far distant second. There is a simple means to solve this problem.

Mail voters their registration cards say 30 days before the election. The card must be turned in to vote. No card no vote. Send the cards first class mail, with a "no forwarding" instruction on it, and drop from the voter rolls those whose cards come back. When you go to vote, you must show a government issued ID card with the same street address on it as the registration card.
otherwise no vote.

 

> So why to object finger-print detection? Anyway that's not

What next? DNA samples? Where's our freedom?

> changes in an individual's characteristics with age. The
> whole idea is that to prevent fraudulence it's better to
>detect any feature of an individual which cannot be forged
>and finger-print is one of them.

Each voter must register with a precinct and must vote in that precinct. When you go to your precinct to vote, you must show your voter ID card
[considered valid legal identification]. The ballot workers then cross your name off the list. At that point, another vote cannot be registered in your name.

> boxes. So to prevent such happenings it's better to get the
> votes recorded on the voting machine which is enabled after proper
authentication.

Computers crash. Think of what might happen if 10,000 votes were lost in silicon hell. Paper trails are important and the actual ballots can be
protected from fraud. If you argue that ballots can be tampered with, that is a security issue and all methods of voting are subject to security risks.

> So I feel this hi-tech system will surely provide us
> with a fairer election

You feel this way because you work with technology every day. Older citizens vote in much higher percentages than other age groups. You take for granted that some people do not work with computers in any fashion whatsoever. They
won't know what a pop-up box is or what to do with it. When you give them a ballot and ask them to punch a hole next to their candidate, that is
something anyone can do (except for a select few Floridians).

Everyone is arguing about how to make elections easier for the persons counting the votes. What about the people casting the votes? Which is more
important?

 

> > > The basic problem with punch cards seems to be that it is
> > > too easy to use improperly leaving the results ambiguous
> >
> > Regardless of the specific system, is it really possible to come up
> > with a system that can count votes to an accuracy of 0.000001% ? This is
> > the accuracy required for a national popular election (1 in 100,000,000)
> > in the US.
>
> If the errors are random, there is no significant effect on the
> outcome. The problem arises when the errors are systematic, i.e. a
> number of defective machines or ballots in one or more sensitive
> areas. Does anyone ever apply any of the standard SPC techniques to
> verify the functioning of the voting equipment?

SPC techniques won't work here. The screaming is all about "EVERY vote must be counted". To count EVERY vote requires EXTREME precision.

> To continue the industrial analogy, the process is not very robust.
> The system tends to magnify errors or perturbations rather than
> supress them.

The process generally works fine except when the margin of victory is less than the margin of error. Can an automatic voting process be designed that can repeatedly count millions of votes to an accuracy of 0.000001%?

> Perhaps what you really need is a constitutional
> monarchy with a prime minister chosen from the party with the most
> seats in parliament.... (ha-ha!).

Why stop there? why not just go to a monarchy and avoid all these messy elections? ;-)

> But seriously, no one has really explained just why these machines
> are necessary in the first place. Plenty of countries get along quite
> nicely without them. Other people have mentioned that these machines
> are so old because no one feels its worth spending money on equipment
> that gets used so seldom. So why not just toss them out and count the
> ballots by hand? Where is the return on investment here?

Just like in the industrial world: labor saving and productivity. Machines are needed because some precincts are so large that they don't have enough volunteers, money for hired workers, and/or enough workers willing to work to count the ballots without machines. In one city I lived in previously there were 4 (2 in local elections) retired ladies running the polling station. They shipped the ballots to the county office in a sheriff's car where they were counted. There are about 500,000 people in that county (I think).

> > The biggest undiscussed problem with this election isn't the
> > technical end. The real issue is the identification of unauthorized
> > voters. There are some simple technical solutions to this issue, as
> > well, but for one major problem. The databases that must be used to
> > verify who is and who is not a legal voter are not being permitted to be
> > used.
>
> Forgive my ignorance of US election procedures, but I thought that
> requiring voters to register solved that problem. Please enlighten me. Here
> in Canada anyone with two pieces of identification (an electricity bill
> could be one) can register to vote right up to and including election day.
> Lots of room for problems, but it leaves the door open for wider use of
> computers.

Most of these regulations here in the USA are locally determined. ID is not required. In fact, denying someone a ballot because they don't have ID is illegal. Here in Michigan, USA; all I need to vote is to know my name, address and birthdate. If that matches the voter records they have at the poll, I get a ballot. Anybody who has this information about somebody else and they know they are registered but aren't voting can (illegally) vote in their place. This is how you get dead people voting, etc.

Regards,
Ralph Mackiewicz
SISCO, Inc.

 

At 21:15 07/12/00 +0530, Pradeep Chatterjee wrote:
<clip>
>Oppositions go on a rampage, capture voting booths, stamp ballot papers
>and finally also capture ballot boxes. So to prevent such happenings...
<clip>
It sounds like elections must be a bit more exciting in India than they are in Canada. The worst thing I have to worry about is if I arrive at a busy time and there is a line up.

>Each area will have it's local database and at the end of the day even
>counting will be done locally (in the PC) and for a few minutes it can be
>connected to private net to dump the results.
> In order to make an individual sure that his/her vote has
>been accepted, after making selection, a box will pop up for a few
>seconds on the screen showing the symbol of his/her choice and
>thereby confirming that it has been recorded.
<clip>
There is a company in Vancouver which already has a touch screen computer based election system. The election laws in Canada don't allow its use in federal or provincial elections, but I believe they have sold it to a
number of other countries. I don't recall the company's name, but I read about it in the news a few weeks ago.

David_Leese wrote:
>>no one has really explained just why these machines
>>are necessary in the first place. Plenty of countries
>>get along quite nicely without them.
>
>It is my understanding (not my experience) that many
>other countries limit the election to only one or a few
>races. We had 30+ officials to put in office in my
>precint/district/county combination. Perhaps if we
>Americans would agree to hold a national election to
>select officials for only the 2 or 3 open national
>offices, then a hand count would be reasonable.

30+ officials to elect? How can anyone figure out who to vote for with all these choices to make? No wonder things get screwed up. I would get confused just trying to figure out who was running for what.
Our elections are not on a fixed schedule (except for municipal elections), so they rarely coincide with each other. In the recent federal
elections, I just had to pick who I wanted as my MP.
It is apparent from the 30+ number you mention that any ballot verification system would have to provide information to the voter as to
what it didn't like about the ballot. Any purely software system (i.e. touch screen) would need to guide the voter through multiple screens as I don't think you could reasonably fit 30+ choices on one screen.
I can see complaints arising because someone felt the menus and screens were "too confusing", or were not laid out "fairly". Or someone will swear that their candidate's name didn't appear on the screen when they voted. Someone else will claim that whenever they tried to vote for their candidate, the computer died in a Windows NT "blue screen of death" (and
statistically its bound to happen) - "proof" if you will that Bill Gates used Windows to rig the election.

[email protected] wrote:
<clip>
>Mail voters their registration cards say 30 days before the election. The
>card must be turned in to vote. No card no vote.
<clip>
>When you go to vote, you must show a government issued ID card with
>the same street address on it as the registration card.
>otherwise no vote.
<clip>
This is what we do, except that if you show up with the card they don't ask for ID (at least I wasn't asked for it), and if you show up
without it, you still get to vote anyway (with a two pieces of ID). After all, what if you weren't on the voters list? What if you had just moved? The card is pretty handy though, because it speeds things up at the polls.

Glass, Philip wrote:
<clip>
>You feel this way because you work with technology every day. Older citizens
>vote in much higher percentages than other age groups. You take for granted
>that some people do not work with computers in any fashion whatsoever. They
>won't know what a pop-up box is or what to do with it.

Don't under-rate someone's experience just because they are old. A recent survey found that in Canada (with the world's highest rate of
internet use), internet use was growing the fastest with people over 65. There are a lot of pictures of grandchildren getting e-mailed every day.

<clip>
>Everyone is arguing about how to make elections easier for the persons
>counting the votes. What about the people casting the votes? Which is more
>important?

I absolutely agree with this. We are hearing far too many "solutions" whose answer to a problem with the system is to prevent people
from voting. Any solution should be so easy and convenient that *more* people will want to vote, not less.


Allen Nelson wrote:
>Repeatability and Reproducability are not major factors here, as we only
>need to have a single ballot repeat its count twice (one for the voter,
>once for the election board). And if the first one isn't accurate, it's
>tossed by the voter.

R&R is *always* an issue. If it wasn't, we wouldn't be having this discussion, and the Americans wouldn't be still trying to figure out who won their election a month after it is over. I've never seen a machine which measured anything in which R&R wasn't an issue. Sometimes the R&R is good, sometimes not so good. But if you never check it, how do you know the system works?

>As for ROI, I've heard of numbers of on the order of half a million
>dollars to do the hand recounts (made "necessary" because the reading
>machine wasn't programmed to detect what some voters intended, and some
>(actually all) voters didn't know what the machine would read.

We did a hand count of every single ballot in our election, and had virtually all of them done in 4 hours (although we didn't have the 30+ positions to fill as mentioned in the message above). The election officials and scrutineers have to be at each poll while the ballots are cast. They just have to stay a little longer after they close to count them.

If you count by machine you still need people to run and supervise the polls, plus you have the initial capital outlay of all the hardware and software plus no doubt a much higher cost of setting up and testing the hardware. If you use cards you need people to feed the cards into the machines. You need people to maintain and repair the hardware and to verify that it is working in an honest and fair manner. None of this is cheap.

The capital cost involved at each poll in a hand count system is negligable. It only takes ballot papers (printed slips), small privacy
screens to mark your ballot behind (less than a square metre of cardboard sitting on a table top), and ballot boxes (they looked as if they were just cardboard boxes with a slit in them plus a seal). There is nothing to break down, nothing to repair and it needs minimal training. This sounds fairly cheap to me for something which gets used once every three to five years.

>But your comment does raise an issue re: R&R. Why did the vote count
>change between the two machine counts? If it was just hanging chads
>falling off between counts, that's OK, because having the voter read his
>his card before leaving the poll would diminish the likelihood of hanging
>chads. (I acknowledge that a chad could hang, be clear for the voter, but
>wind up blocking for the tabulator. But statistically, that should happen
>in equal proportion to the voters for each candidate, and cancel each
>other out). If, however, the current tabulators are not 100.0000%
>accurate, then they need to be improved or eliminated.

Have you ever seen a feeder that absolutely never jammed? Have you ever seen a flexible raw material that didn't fold up like an accordian once in a while? Have you ever seen a sensor that didn't get dirty and detect in an erratic manner? Think about the problems your machines at work have and now imagine them being operated by car salesmen and school teachers.
The surprising thing is not that these voting machines have problems, the surprising thing is that they work as well as they do.


**********************
Michael Griffin
London, Ont. Canada
[email protected]
**********************

 

(Moderator's general note: As this thread wears on, responses are mostly drifting away from the original question of HMI and equipment design, to
political commentary, voting laws, and the like. Please take off-topic comments offline. Thanks...--Jennifer)


Dear Mr Chatterjee--
What will happen if a hacker gets into the database and just wipes it off? This will be worse than Laloo`s henchmen capturing a few booths. So far as elections are there, rigging in some for will be there. You cannot eradicate it completely just as you cannot change human habits. Could anyone change Russy? or for that matter Laloo?
Best Regards.
A.Jabbar

 

I have a solution, outlined below, but have no contact with a marketing and promotion entity. Any suggestions who I might contact would be appreciated. From D.K. Miles February 5, 2001 Proposal to: 1. Simplify the act of voting via punch cards. 2. Improve the accuracy of counting votes cast on punch card ballots. 3. Speed the tally of the vote. 4. Better inform the voter of the issues at the time he casts the vote. 5. Reduce the overall cost of the election procedure _______________________________________________________________________ 1. I have redesigned a component of the existing Votomatic punch card voting machine, which will allow the voter to see a record of the vote that he has cast. As the voter proceeds through the ballot he will see whether he voted on an individual issue, and how he voted. At the conclusion of his session he can review all of his votes and punch a final hole in the card that will acknowledge that he has reviewed his ballot and that the recorded vote is correct. 2. The voter will have double-checked his vote and attested to the accuracy of his ballot. At the moment he acknowledges the vote, the vote will be simultaneously recorded in a computer connected to the component I have added to the Votomatic voting machine. As the voting proceeds, each ballot will be added to the total at the precinct so that at the end of the day, a final total of the precinct vote will be immediately available. A copy of the electronic information, packaged with the punch cards, provide a foolproof record of all the votes cast in the precinct. 3. All records, electronic and hard copy, are available immediately. There can be no question of the accuracy of the individual ballot since the voter attested to the accuracy of his vote at the conclusion of his session. The punch card had to be completely punctured to record the vote, which eliminates the need for hand counting and interpretation of voter intent. 4. Information regarding the candidates and issues will appear on a computer screen in front of the voter. The voter can review any information provided on the screen and then select a number of the hole he wishes to punch to record his vote. As he proceeds through the ballot a running tally of his vote will appear on the screen. If he makes an error he may ask for a fresh ballot. When he is done voting he punches a final hole in the ballot acknowledging accuracy. 5. Cost to the election board will be reduced. The price of the component I have designed to install in Votomatic punch card voting machines has been determined to be low. There will be a one-time charge for software loaded on each computer used. Each voting station will require a computer monitor that can be temporarily borrowed. Each station will be linked to a temporarily borrowed computer. Several voting stations, with their monitors, can be linked to a single computer so that many precincts having multiple stations will require only one computer. All precincts voting on similar ballots can be programmed at once. Changing the ballot among different precincts with different candidates and issues only requires simple programming modifications of the basic ballot. This eliminates the time and expense of loading the individual voting machines with printed information. Summary: This system will allow voters to use familiar equipment therefor will not require extensive re-education. The modest investment required to buy the new part for existing voting machines and new program software will be offset by the savings in set-up time. No new capital investment program will be required as would be the case if the present Votomatic punch card system was replaced by a radically new system. This system provides near perfect accuracy in recording the vote. Donald K. Miles 17066 10th Ave NW Shoreline, WA 98177 Phone 206 542 8580