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from the confusing-cost-with-effectiveness dept.
Picked via Bruce Schneier's Cryptogram, the story of a massive electronic vote miscount, luckily paper ballots were available
Vote totals in a Northampton County judge's race showed one candidate, Abe Kassis, a Democrat, had just 164 votes out of 55,000 ballots across more than 100 precincts. Some machines reported zero votes for him. In a county with the ability to vote for a straight-party ticket, one candidate's zero votes was a near statistical impossibility. Something had gone quite wrong.
The worse news:
The machines that broke in Northampton County are called the ExpressVoteXL and are made by Election Systems & Software, a major manufacturer of election machines used across the country. The ExpressVoteXL is among their newest and most high-end machines, a luxury "one-stop" voting system that combines a 32-inch touch screen and a paper ballot printer.
The good news was that the chairwoman of the county Republicans realized the numbers made no sense and promptly initiated an investigation. When officials counted the paper backup ballots generated by the same machines, they realized Kassis had narrowly won.
How many trees still need to die until humans learn how to do voting properly?
Note: the original story ran on nytimes, but I respect their choice to not let me read their stories with 'Do not track' activated
(Score: 3, Interesting) by canopic jug on Tuesday December 17 2019, @11:48AM
Failure is inherent in blackbox voting and there are unsovlable problems with electronic voting in general [schneier.com]. It's a topic that has been done to death in the last 20 years, again and again, but the worst parts are the BLOBs [wikipedia.org] involved. Notably the worst of those come from your f-ing company so don't act all innocent of this.
Elections aren't just about picking a winner, they are also about being able to prove the veracity of the results. That is a capability which the US has fully lacked for going on 20 years now, mostly bcause of electronic voting. Even upgrading to Free/Libre and Open Source Software won't satisfy those requirements. Paper ballots won't help much if you still use machines to tabulate them because the current state of computing hardware and software just can't guarantee the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of the election data.
If you really are concerned, change employers and find ways to try to work off all that bad karma accumulated there. On the side get involved with initiatives to eliminate voting blackboxes [blackboxvoting.org]. Probably the best way to get up to speed is to slog through the old videos from DefCon's [defcon.org] annual Voting Village [defcon.org] (warning for PDF). Videos are much slower than reading but that's where the results and directions for future remediation efforts are presented.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.