Reliability of new voting machines questioned-Associated Press

[mark_m]

I’ll add that I found this in the the Ohio revised code, language calling out the audit ability of the voters choices, how they are recorded on paper, and be optically readable, etc. This gives some comfort that in Ohio that if there was an audit things would line up.

<insert Michigan / OSU jab here>

I’m not an attorney but see sec 3a onwards

Section 3506.05 - Ohio Revised Code | Ohio Laws

codes.ohio.gov

 

[Rotax627]

This is not a bash or political message......Please do not respond, please just read the article and make up your own mind whether our vote in our democracy is at risk from foreign or domestic threats using electronic machines to vote. No matter how you voted, this information should concern us all. The article about the risk was written on February, 24, 2020.....Vote flipping of thousands of votes in just one county actually did in fact occur election night in Northern Michigan, so this really happened. It was caught only because a poll worker thought it seemed odd, so they decided to hand-count ballots, and that is how the “flipped votes” were uncovered:

Reliability of new voting machines questioned

Nearly 1 in 5 U.S. voters will cast ballots this year on devices that look and feel like the discredited paperless voting machines they once used, yet

www.dispatch.com

The machines have been vigorously promoted by the trio of privately held voting equipment vendors that control 88% of the U.S. market and are nearly unregulated at the federal level. They are expected to be used by some 40 million eligible voters more than in the 2018 midterm elections.

Key counties in the crucial swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Carolina, much of Texas, California’s Los Angeles County and all of Georgia and Delaware have bought ballot-marking machines. So has South Carolina, which will use them in Saturday’s primaries.

Some of the most popular such devices, from Election Systems & Software and Dominion Voting Systems, register votes in bar codes that the human eye can’t decipher. That means skilled hackers could alter outcomes without detection, gaming bar codes while keeping voters’ choices on the human-readable portion of the ballot printout, computer scientists have found.

Northampton County, on Pennsylvania’s eastern edge, became ground zero last November in the debate over ballot-marking devices when its newly purchased ES&S ExpressVote XLs failed in two different ways.

First, a ballot programming error prevented votes cast for one of three candidates in a judge’s race from registering in the bar codes used to count the vote. Only absentee ballot votes registered electronically for the candidate. A manual recount of the paper voting records settled the election.

The other problem: miscalibrated touchscreens on about a third of the county’s 320 machines.

One poll judge called the touchscreens “garbage,” and some voters who registered complaints in emails obtained by The Associated Press in a public records request said their votes were assigned to the wrong candidates — an error known as “vote-flipping.”

Please go factcheck.org before creating more obfuscation in our country. Here's the article to address your concern.

Clerical Error Prompts Unfounded Claims About Michigan Results - FactCheck.org

A data input error that briefly showed an unusually large uptick in votes for Joe Biden in Michigan prompted suspicions online and an unfounded claim of voter fraud. The error came down to a typo by a county's reporting that was quickly corrected.

www.factcheck.org

 

[Mainah]

Keeping things strictly to the voting machines and how votes most likely would be flipped. It has nothing to do with the hardware but rather the software/database. Humans must program/relate/map the front end GUI to the database. Within the database there are ids and values that also must be related/mapped. Based on decades of experience as a data scientist this is how I imagine it works. Each precinct will have multiple races/measures to vote on and all will have a distinct id and values in that precinct. Tallying all of the precincts in a county requires that the next level up have all of the ids from each precinct mapped correctly. Same with the state receiving the data from the counties. Humans are prone to honest error in this kind of relational mapping especially when that requires communication between different levels. Sure the same thing can be been done intentionally/nefariously but given my experience usually an honest mistake.

We all want results instantly these days. Instant does not leave time for robust controls and validation that are a normal part of big data. Fast, cheap, and high quality are not words that typically go together. I do imagine there are folks working on data validations from both sides.

What does seem obvious is that half of us think the other half is crazy. Lets find some common ground we can all agree on.... We love boating!

 

[Enduro900]

Please go factcheck.org before creating more obfuscation in our country. Here's the article to address your concern.

Clerical Error Prompts Unfounded Claims About Michigan Results - FactCheck.org

A data input error that briefly showed an unusually large uptick in votes for Joe Biden in Michigan prompted suspicions online and an unfounded claim of voter fraud. The error came down to a typo by a county's reporting that was quickly corrected.

www.factcheck.org

If you think my concerns are unsubstantiated, and are not the concerns of “experts” you are sadly mistaken:

“Critics say currently available ballot-marking devices undermine the very idea of retaining a paper record. It’s an idea supported by a 2018 National Academies of Sciences report that favors hand-marked ballots tallied by optical scanners, which 70 percent of U.S. voters used in 2016 and 2018 and will again rely on in November. It is a stance also shared by Colorado, a national leader in election security. The state is banning bar codes from ballot-marking voting machines beginning in 2021.”

So there is absolutely no risk or no concern, yet Colorado is BANNING the process for 2021????? Was that little snip-it anywhere in your “fact-check” article??? It kinda changes the context of the little “snafu” that occurred in Michigan doesn’t it?

And this exact situation just happened in one county in michigan, that was DEFINED back in February what the risk is:

Some of the most popular such devices, from Election Systems & Software and Dominion Voting Systems, register votes in bar codes that the human eye can’t decipher. That means skilled hackers could alter outcomes without detection, gaming bar codes while keeping voters’ choices on the human-readable portion of the ballot printout, computer scientists have found.

So how do we know this didn’t happen other places if we don’t even look?????

Is the Associated Press also involved in my “spreading more obfuscation in our country”?

Thanks for the factcheck.org bathroom tissue though....

 

[Beachbummer]

Some of the most popular such devices, from Election Systems & Software and Dominion Voting Systems, register votes in bar codes that the human eye can’t decipher. That means skilled hackers could alter outcomes without detection, gaming bar codes while keeping voters’ choices on the human-readable portion of the ballot printout, computer scientists have found.

You don't have to worry about the obscure and unreadable bar code...you can use your OWN bar code reader to read the code on a set of ballots and see how far off it was. Any smartphone with a camera can be a bar code reader with the right app. If this is an issue, it will get found out.

 

[Enduro900]

You don't have to worry about the obscure and unreadable bar code...you can use your OWN bar code reader to read the code on a set of ballots and see how far off it was. Any smartphone with a camera can be a bar code reader with the right app. If this is an issue, it will get found out.

Haha now you tell us

My polling station didn’t use these touch screen machines.....paper ballot and feeder machine for us.

Are all barcodes now standardized? My knowledge of barcodes goes back to the early 1990’s, and at that time I thought certain software was needed to read certain readers....

 

[mark_m]

You don't have to worry about the obscure and unreadable bar code...you can use your OWN bar code reader to read the code on a set of ballots and see how far off it was. Any smartphone with a camera can be a bar code reader with the right app. If this is an issue, it will get found out.

To the point of getting found out... if you did any kind of statistical sampling of paper trail info and barcodes you will arrive at a level of confidence in the accuracy.

I always look at the paper ticket that’s generated as I vote with one of these machines in our precinct.

In Ohio: (link in my post above)

(3)

(a) Before the initial certification of any direct recording electronic voting machine with a voter verified paper audit trail, and as a condition for the continued certification and use of those machines, the secretary of state shall establish, by rule, standards for the certification of those machines. Those standards shall include, but are not limited to, all of the following:

(i) A definition of a voter verified paper audit trail as a paper record of the voter's choices that is verified by the voter prior to the casting of the voter's ballot and that is securely retained by the board of elections;

(ii) Requirements that the voter verified paper audit trail shall not be retained by any voter and shall not contain individual voter information;

(iii) A prohibition against the production by any direct recording electronic voting machine of anything that legally could be removed by the voter from the polling place, such as a receipt or voter confirmation;

(iv) A requirement that paper used in producing a voter verified paper audit trail be sturdy, clean, and resistant to degradation;

(v) A requirement that the voter verified paper audit trail shall be capable of being optically scanned for the purpose of conducting a recount or other audit of the voting machine and shall be readable in a manner that makes the voter's ballot choices obvious to the voter without the use of computer or electronic codes;

 

[Enduro900]

To the point of getting found out... if you did any kind of statistical sampling of paper trail info and barcodes you will arrive at a level of confidence in the accuracy.

I always look at the paper ticket that’s generated as I vote with one of these machines in our precinct.

In Ohio: (link in my post above)

(3)

(a) Before the initial certification of any direct recording electronic voting machine with a voter verified paper audit trail, and as a condition for the continued certification and use of those machines, the secretary of state shall establish, by rule, standards for the certification of those machines. Those standards shall include, but are not limited to, all of the following:

(i) A definition of a voter verified paper audit trail as a paper record of the voter's choices that is verified by the voter prior to the casting of the voter's ballot and that is securely retained by the board of elections;

(ii) Requirements that the voter verified paper audit trail shall not be retained by any voter and shall not contain individual voter information;

(iii) A prohibition against the production by any direct recording electronic voting machine of anything that legally could be removed by the voter from the polling place, such as a receipt or voter confirmation;

(iv) A requirement that paper used in producing a voter verified paper audit trail be sturdy, clean, and resistant to degradation;

(v) A requirement that the voter verified paper audit trail shall be capable of being optically scanned for the purpose of conducting a recount or other audit of the voting machine and shall be readable in a manner that makes the voter's ballot choices obvious to the voter without the use of computer or electronic codes;

I’d ask you to show us your copy of the barcode as an example, but depending on who you voted for may get you blocked so I won’t

 

[mark_m]

I’d ask you to show us your copy of the barcode as an example, but depending on who you voted for may get you blocked so I won’t

As an example... QR code. Use your smartphone camera to decipher it.

 

[Enduro900]

As an example... QR code. Use your smartphone camera to decipher it.

Ok, I’ll admit I am a very stupid person.....please do not hold it against me.

But how can someone tell the barcode (your QR code), printed next to the name of their candidate of their choice, is the right candidate? I see a complicated square code, that tells me nothing. And again I cannot get my head around that it was 30% of the ballots.....if it was 100% that makes much more sense.....the 30% tells me someone messed with/introduced an algorithm.

And I am not trying to be “tin foil hat” here......the more I look at this, the more I am concerned.

Including now I read that Colorado is so concerned about issues Using this exact same system, that they have banned using this system in elections starting in 2021.

Does this mean anything? IT means to me there are serious issues, OR there is some serious lobbying and possible influence $$$ in Colorado from the “paper ballot” manufacturers association,,,,,,yes I see either one being a possibilty

 

[Beachbummer]

They can't tell with their naked eye, but you bet the poll witnesses ran some test ballots and confirmed the machine acted as they expected when their candidate was chosen.

(Although I imagine if you train enough and have a model bar code to memorize you COULD potentially tell two known bar codes apart)

 

[Enduro900]

They can't tell with their naked eye, but you bet the poll witnesses ran some test ballots and confirmed the machine acted as they expected when their candidate was chosen.

(Although I imagine if you train enough and have a model bar code to memorize you COULD potentially tell two known bar codes apart)

I agree 100%, I am sure people would have done some tests before the doors opened.

That is why I cannot get my head around the 30% flip......100% flip? Ok, maybe an unintentional set-up error....

And again, now add in this system is banned in Colorado for future elections startling in 2021.

I just see a whole lotta risk going forward using this system......for what? Maybe an election night that ends at 10pm instead of 2am??

Its just starting to look like a “risk vs. reward” discussion needs to happen sometime.....

 

[Beachbummer]

Here's my take:

I like those rules presented in Ohio that were mentioned earlier....When the system can be audited by the naked eye and the voter had a chance to review that audit ticket, you can have both speed of results and auditability, in that you have printed proof that the machine is reporting what the voter saw at the time on paper and it matches.

I'd love those to be implemented in Texas...like I said earlier I don't distrust the system, but there is zero printed proof in Texas so auditing to the naked eye is very hard to do. At the same time, participants and candidates feel comfortable and trust the system, so who am I to complain.

 

[mark_m]

Ok, I’ll admit I am a very stupid person.....please do not hold it against me.

But how can someone tell the barcode (your QR code), printed next to the name of their candidate of their choice, is the right candidate? I see a complicated square code, that tells me nothing. And again I cannot get my head around that it was 30% of the ballots.....if it was 100% that makes much more sense.....the 30% tells me someone messed with/introduced an algorithm.

And I am not trying to be “tin foil hat” here......the more I look at this, the more I am concerned.

Including now I read that Colorado is so concerned about issues Using this exact same system, that they have banned using this system in elections starting in 2021.

Does this mean anything? IT means to me there are serious issues, OR there is some serious lobbying and possible influence $$$ in Colorado from the “paper ballot” manufacturers association,,,,,,yes I see either one being a possibilty

Not meaning to be too cynical here... but it means to me that one of the alternate/competing voting system suppliers greased the rails with the Colorado legislature.

 

[Enduro900]

Not meaning to be too cynical here... but it means to me that one of the alternate/competing voting system suppliers greased the rails with the Colorado legislature.

And you may very well be right.....why I also said so myself.

Sure helps the “raised eyebrows” case right now though.

 

[BigAbe75]

I am saying that in general not pointing to a certain political side so I dont flag the "moderators" even though they can give their side leaning input with no issue

I may be behind... but I don’t recall seeing anything like that. As far as I can tell, @Administrative does a decent job of keeping neutral.

 

[Rockfords Fosgate]

With these 'clerical errors', closed door counting (Yes GA I am referring to you), delayed mail-in ballots, machines that barf when only one page of a 2-page-ballot is returned, touchscreen calibration issues, and difficulty in protecting the eligible voting population (dead people shouldn't vote)...it seems to me that the best way out of this mess will be through blockchain. Ditch voting machines and this non-sense mail in ballot scheme.

 

[Beachbummer]

Block-chain? talk about naked eye auditability not being possible.

Why not both? Lock the machine up with whatever encryption and block chain tech you want, and give me a little piece of paper we can count after the fact too.

 

[Julian]

That is why I cannot get my head around the 30% flip......100% flip? Ok, maybe an unintentional set-up error....

My understanding is it was only a partial amount because not all the ballots are the same in an area. The ballots are specific down to a very small area and have to account for every race.

 

[BigAbe75]

Keeping things strictly to the voting machines and how votes most likely would be flipped. It has nothing to do with the hardware but rather the software/database. Humans must program/relate/map the front end GUI to the database. Within the database there are ids and values that also must be related/mapped. Based on decades of experience as a data scientist this is how I imagine it works.

I work in K12, and built a web application a few years ago for the students to vote online for homecoming court. I’m an amateur programmer at best, but it was a fun project that turned out well.

I guess what troubles me is that there seems to be no standard. In my precinct, I complete a bubble sheet and feed it through a scantron reader just like standardized testing at school 25 yrs ago.

Making the various databases all match up as @Mainah described could definitely be a chore and prone to human typos.