Felten: Some New Jersey voting machines can't add

[mjh]

A printed tape offered as evidence of the integrity of a Sequoia Voting Systems machine failed a very obvious test last week, as a Princeton professor noted a simple column of numbers actually added up to 105, not 106.

The Princeton University professor who has received national acclaim for his efforts to assess the true integrity of electronic voting machines, discovered one very simple error amid the evidence one manufacturer, Sequoia Voting Systems, had actually offered in its own defense. In recent weeks, Sequoia has found itself in hot water again for as many as sixty separate discrepancies reported in a single election in New Jersey last February 3.

All those discrepancies were attributed to a single model: Sequoia's AVC Advantage, using system firmware version 9.0.

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When will this nonsense end? I doubt the e-voting machines will ever be 100 percent full proof, but come on...

Do you trust e-voting machines? Why or why not?

 

[Vette73]

No, i don't trust them.

Even if it has a paper trail what happens when they don;t match? Do you believe the paper or the machine. And if they don;t match then what? Of course makes you whonder why these companies don;t want a paper trail as well.


To me the best all round, as there is no perfect IMO, is just use a scan form that you fill in one box and machine counts it. Can be added up quick and be hand counted easy.

 

[Harvey]

Originally posted by: Marlin1975
No, i don't trust them.

Even if it has a paper trail what happens when they don;t match? Do you believe the paper or the machine. And if they don;t match then what?

One advantage of a paper trail is that the voter has a an instant printout to confirm that the votes entered into the system are correct. If the printout doesn't match, the voter has a chance to catch the error and correct it in real time.

Another advantage is that it's more difficult to alter a phyical printout than electronically stored data without leaving any evidence of illicit changes.

 

[bbdub333]

Hopefully one day, microprocessor technology will progress to the point where we can successfully compute the sum of multiple numbers. Until then, we should probably just stick to paper.

 

[Fern]

Originally posted by: Harvey

Originally posted by: Marlin1975
No, i don't trust them.

Even if it has a paper trail what happens when they don;t match? Do you believe the paper or the machine. And if they don;t match then what?

One advantage of a paper trail is that the voter has a an instant printout to confirm that the votes entered into the system are correct. If the printout doesn't match, the voter has a chance to catch the error and correct it in real time.

Another advantage is that it's more difficult to alter a phyical printout than electronically stored data without leaving any evidence of illicit changes.

^ Exactly.

The machines we use here in NC have the paper print-out displayed under glass so you can see how your vote was recorded. I check mine, so far so good.

I just hope the voting officials implement decent audit techniques to compare the print-out to the digitally recorded totals.

Fern

 

[ElFenix]

jesus christ how hard can it possibly be to design a machine that can properly count frickin' votes?


edit: do other countries attempting to count the volumes of votes we do have problems? does anyone count the volume of votes we do? i mean, not only do we have president, senator, and house races up for grabs in big elections, but there are usually a bunch of local guys, judges, mayors, meh, and ballot initiatives of one sort or another. is anywhere else this complicated?