Machine vs. Hand Counts: Both Unreliable

[chess9]

Says the Washington Post.

Lousy Technology Leads to Lousy Results

The Florida election is so screwed up the Florida Supreme Court should order the Secretary of State to NOT certify it...ever.

These problems are the result of legislators and citizens being unwilling to invest in technology to guarantee the viability of our vote counting process.

Is this a lesson for those who want to cut taxes every legislative session?

 

[Format C:]

chess9, I expect to see that remedied the first chance the people get after this election. My sense is that the public will insist steps be taken to prevent this from ever happening again, and I suppose thats one of the very few good things that this whole fiasco has brought about. Fraud, voter confusion, spoiled and thrown out ballots, mistakes, cheating and lying are all common to every election everywhere in this country across all parties. If it involves people and money you can count on it. Perhaps this has been the American Voter's wake-up call. Hopefully they'll answer it instead of rolling back over.

One thought that has occurred to me also sitting back taking all of this in and seeing just how long it takes to get an accurate count in so many different places is, how many president's have we had that actually weren't elected by the people but were merely the winners because of election night calls by the media leading to the other candidate conceding? Interesting thought indeed.

 

[chess9]

FormatC:

These punchcard machines are really much worse than I thought. The notion that millions of people in America voted but their vote didn't count is anti-democratic.

We'll see if the Florida counties and legislature ante up the money. People may not have liked the election, but they like taxes less. I'm betting little changes because of the cost.

We know change will occur in the area of military and absentee ballots. I look for an immediate change in the regs and laws here in Florida. No one should have to walk through the bureaucratic equivalent of Dante's Inferno to vote.

Anyway, the Florida Supreme Court has its hands full deciding what to do about this mess.

 

[Format C:]

Maybe they can take the money that's going to be spent on a useless high speed train to nowhere and apply it to a state of the art voting system. Wanna make bets on which gets done first? 🙂

<< These punchcard machines are really much worse than I thought. The notion that millions of people in America voted but their vote didn't count is anti-democratic. >>

Its also anti-republican 🙂, which in my opinion is why whats happening now really shouldn't. The machines are old technology that has an inherent flaw, but if you distribute that flaw across the entire population of those that used it then the results become more fair or closer to the actual intent of ALL the voters. If you do whats being done now, then the results WILL be skewed because they will be taking away the handicap thats shared equally by everyone everywhere that voted using this method. Thats the way I see it, and I think I'm objective enough that I would see it that way if it was the other way around. Hand counting of ballots such as the ones that are optically scanned is magnitudes of degrees above hand counting these chad droppers.

This particular voting system sucks, and I don't think you'd find anyone that believes otherwise, but, as long as you don't try to outdo the machine's flaws then everyone is subject to equal suckage, and I believe thats why the only recounts that should be done is through the machine unless it can be shown that a particular machine is not functioning as designed. Even then, the machine should be replaced by another one so as not to totally skew the results. Even though the machine fails to count a certain percentage of votes it doesn't know the difference between one party or the other when it kicks a ballot out and thats the ONLY thing about it that IS fair. 🙂

 

[chess9]

FormatC:

I believe that project has already been approved by the local governments and the State. But if it's used as little as the local bus system, I'd agree it's a waste of money. Ultimately, we need real solutions to our transportation problems in this country. We can't expect to keep growing indefinitely and adding more vehicles with one person in them to the highway. Until we can &quot;beam&quot; people to and from work, we'll have to rely upon mass transportation of some type. 😛

 

[Nick Stone]

I'd like to see figures on the total cost of this Florida recount (All of them) Don't forget to add in the court costs, legal fees and expenses, and money spent by the 2 national political parties fighting this battle.

I will bet that this total expense would buy new voting machines for the entire state of Florida -- but then, -- how would these elections be manipulated from now on ?

 

[Imported]

They should go with the touchscreen voting style next time..

 

[Michael]

chess9 - I've done over one hundred manual counts of things in my years working as an auditor. We always do two counts and then a third if the first two disagree. PBC is doing one manual count. I can guarantee that it will be inaccurate. I bet it is more inaccurate than the machine count.

I also was unpopular with some of the employees at clients. I do have the ability to concentrate and the patience to count well and completely. I typically found errors in 30% of my test counts, and that would force them to do complete recounts. I'm not saying the counts were 30% off in total, but that the first count did not tie to my count 3 times out of ten.

When you're trying to count &quot;all&quot; the votes cast, including making subjective decisions on the intent of the voter while counting paper ballots that will breakdown with every bit of handling, you will never get it right.

I do not think that the Florida Supreme Court would or should toss out all of Florida's votes, especially since there was an &quot;accurate&quot; machine count and recount of all the counties (I think that PBC was machine counted 3 times, the first one, the automatic on, and the Republicans requested a third machine count as well).

I do see money finally being spent all over the country to get rid of punch card ballots.

Michael