- the missing votes are from the Lt. Governors race only, not the total ballot
- many people reported software glitches with that specific ballot item
- the study blames faulty programming and insists the state not use electronic voting since it apparently is not reliable
Their conclusions are strongly worded but sound reasonable to me.
Quoted from the executive summary:
• Forensic examinations of the machine programming must be promptly undertaken to obtain answers, locate the source of the errors, and, if appropriate, hold officials accountable.
• Electronic voting systems must be immediately abandoned and paper ballots adopted so that no future elections are conducted on Georgia’s unauditable machines.
• Governor Kemp, Secretary Raffensperger, and legislative leaders must abandon their plan to adopt a new ballot-marking-device electronic voting system that, like the current system, is unauditable and vulnerable to problems of the type experienced in November’s election.
When I moved to California I was really impressed by the way voting is handled here. Specifically two things:
(1) I was able to vote one block away at a neighbors garage. I don't know exactly how this works, but apparently people can volunteer to host a polling place, go through a training program to get certified to do it, and then the state will give them the equipment to do it. These polling places are just about everywhere, and it made voting exceptionally quick and easy.
The neighbors who ran it were also very courteous and professional. While there, I saw them handle several questions and problems that people had, and they did an excellent job. I was truly impressed.
(2) The ballot system was: you mark a paper ballot with a pen, and then you feed that into a scanner which electronically tallies your vote. It also keeps the paper ballot around as a record. So it would seem to offer the practical efficiency of an electronic system with the auditability of a paper system. I liked it.
Having previously voted in three other states, this was the best experience by far. I have my own complaints about California, but I'd love to see this way of handling elections become more widespread.
The nice things about the mark & scan systems are that the voter gets immediate notification of an unscannable ballot: stray marks, mis-marks, overvotes, and similar issues are correctable in real time by the voter, perhaps by exchanging the spoiled ballot for a new one, and destroying the spoiled ballot. The scanned paper ballots are also available to be rescanned for a recount or audit.
Creating a voting system for a many-race election that is intrinsically resistant to manipulation is harder that it first appears. I used to (circa 2000) think that electronic voting would supersede paper ballots in a few years. Now I think that paper ballots have a simplicity and durability that outweighs the apparent convenience of electronic approaches.
source: elections official in two states, voter registrar in one.
> minor candidates' vote shares almost double when their names are adjacent to the names of major candidates
a) eligible to vote b) voted only once c) it is the person that voted and not his/her proxy.
It would be much better to use some biometric, verified by 3 independently developed databases. As those would be hard hard to fake
I’m glad you had a good experience, but I’m very skeptical.
Edit: it seems lots of people can disagree but no one can make an argument this is safer or more reliable in practice.
They make access easier(seniors), errors are correctable, reduce physical human errors(mismark/badmark), and provide a paper and electronic ballot trail.
Electronic ballots really shouldn't be a very difficult engineering challenge. We're already doing all of our financial transactions electronically and mistakes are relatively rare with an absolutely massive volume of transactions.
With sufficient effort, a 100% reliable paper count can be produced. Of course in many cases it may not get that effort, but it's possible, and this attribute is particularly important in an audit.
The thing is, mitigating this for a physical system like paper ballots, requires fairly basic training to become a poll monitor. Whereas the auditing of electronic systems is substantially more complicated, not least of which when for-profit companies compel the county/state into NDA's baring 3rd party audits, which happens to be the case in Georgia.
We witnessed people transporting votes in their personal vehicles in Broward county so there's no real chain of custody along with no verification of identity.
Of course it must be more complicated than that, but even the basic user interface always feels wrong. Just let me push a button that has the candidates name on it or directly above it.
Oh well.
Voting (election administration) is not double entry accounting.
What you want would require every single person being required to cast a ballot and every ballot be counted.
It'd also eliminate the possibility of the secret ballot.
Are you sure that's what you want?
The race was decided by a margin of about 55,000 votes in Kemp's favor.
Kemp, as Secretary of State, was in charge of Georgia state elections, which presented a conflict of interest for him as he sought higher office. Kemp implemented a voter suppression policy called "exact match," which helped to severely complicate the voting process for about 53,000 Georgians, 80% of whom were people of color.
More info: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/georgias-voter-suppr...
Also, voter fraud basically does not exist in the United States as per this article from the Brennan Center: https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/debunking-voter-fraud...
In fact, the most notable example of election fraud in the United States in recent memory is in NC's 9th Congressional District, where it looks like the Republican in the race cheated his way to victory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_North_Carolina%27s_9th_co...
edit: as burlesona rightly points out below, the article to which this comment is attached is about the Lt. Gov.'s race. My comment is about the general lack of integrity in Georgia's elections, and the deeply undemocratic (small-D) results that emerge from this state of affairs.
The article says many people reported software glitches where the Lt. Governor ballot item did not display or work correctly, which matches their findings that there were a lot less vost cast than expected for that specific race.
Having said that, the explanation by OP does add significantly to the general case of the integrity of the whole process in Georgia being suspect and need review to ensure the rights of all voters are guaranteed. Otherwise, the process is more obviously a farce than even before and will sow discontent even further.
An explainer: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/11/18134636/...
Note that the Republican obsession with voter fraud is actually an attempt to justify election fraud.
So fraud doesn’t exist but then fraud does exist? Which is it?
No amount (or lack thereof) of technology matters if you get wrongly purged off the voter rolls.
The best option to me seems to be scanned paper ballots, which offers the ability to perform analog recounts when there is suspicion of problems with the digital count.
(Disclaimer: only a distant observer of this, there may be better options.)
The fundamental difference between computer systems and paper systems is that the effort required to corrupt a computer system is mostly unrelated to the size of the corruption. Paper systems require a lot more effort for a large effect.
Typically, there are ballot accountability reports. eg 100 ballots printed for election day. 50 ballots issued, 49 ballots cast, 1 ballot spoiled, 50 unused ballots. 100 ballots returned to election HQ (central count).
Adding or removing ballots from poll site based elections would be noticed.
I can't speak to (all) other jurisdictions, so YMMV.
Seems like a good kind of work to spread, thanks for sharing.
That doesn't cover every failure mode, but it's pretty good compared to nothing.
(And do you really think calling any other answer dishonest is going to help the discussion?)
Just spitballing here, because it seems like an easy problem to solve, the US is just notoriously stubborn when it comes to mixing up the election process.
Votes must not be attributable to any given person, or else the potential for coercion exists.
Many developed democracies either never stopped using a pure paper ballot, or have gone back to it over the last decade or so. For all its flaws, it's easier to make safer than electronic voting.
That’s public info and should be audited.
The part that remains secret is who/what I voted for.
Edit:clarity
Shouldn't there be a convention of writing Georgia (US) or (state)?
1. the voting machines used were known well in advance to be badly vulnerable [0]:
He said hackers could infect election computers by first gaining access to a state employee’s computer, possibly by tricking him or her into clicking on a dangerous link in an email. Once the malware is on one machine, it could reach central election systems through internal networks, USB devices or memory cards.
J. Alex Halderman prepares to demonstrate Monday at Georgia Tech how easy it is to hack Georgia’s electronic voting machines. In a hypothetical election, Halderman changed a 2-2 vote between George Washington and Benedict Arnold to make Arnold the winner by 3-1.
Election computers could also be subverted in person, by someone like a janitor or a temporary worker, Halderman said. Individual voting machines could be tampered with if someone unlocked the latch that protects the memory card port.
2. He reported security researchers (hired by state Democrats) to the FBI for trying to 'hack the system' [1], whereas...
In 2015, Kemp’s office inadvertently released the Social Security numbers and other identifying information of millions of Georgia voters. His office blamed a clerical error.
[...]His office made headlines again last year after security experts disclosed a gaping security hole that wasn’t fixed until six months after it was first reported to election authorities. Personal data was again exposed for Georgia voters — 6.7 million at the time — as were passwords used by county officials to access files.
<eyeroll/>
3. Georgia implemented a use-it-or-lose-it policy for voting. People found out that because they didn't vote in the past that they had been purged from the register of voters. That's insane to me, but apparently the Supreme Court determined it was constitutional. Georgia also implemented extremely strict name-matching (i.e. make sure that you did not use a hyphen when writing your name one place and a space when writing it in another, because then they won't match). [2]
But voting rights advocates fear that “use it or lose it” purges could be used as a voter suppression tactic — along with voter ID requirements, gerrymandering, polling place changes or closures, and registration obstacles — that often help conservative candidates, because infrequent voters tend to be younger, poorer and people of color who are more likely to favor Democrats. For instance, the APM Reports investigation found that such purges in Ohio disproportionately affected urban, Democratic-leaning counties.
[0] https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/how-...
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/a-look-at-the-election...
[2] https://www.wabe.org/georgia-purged-about-107000-people-from...
