Arkansas Blog

"Haggard is confident that the pending ES&S audit will find the commission's current vote tally to be correct."

So, they're gonn'a let the company whose incompetent programming caused the problem, be the same company who audits the results of that programming? Brilliant, absofrackinglutely brilliant!

(And maybe when ES&S finishes up there, they can come down and help Max with this cruddy blogging software)

If you didn't realize how scary touch screen voting technology was until reading this article, you must be bunking with Osama bin Laden. Touch screens are the purest form of stealing votes and elections.

One special election at our Pulaski County voting precinct several years ago we had fewer than 100 voters use the touch screen and the paper roll that records votes and allows for a recount jammed not once, but twice. And since the touch screen does not sound an audible alarm when the paper jams, so much for being able to fix the problem immediately so you can recount votes if necessary.

Federal requirements require a touch screen at every precinct for visually and hearing impaired voters. But the paper ballot scanner runs circles around the touch screen, allowing for much quicker processing of paper ballots which are available should a recount be necessary. One scanner can do the work of more than 12 touch screens at a much lower cost and with better accountability.

That said, even scanners are not foolproof. They too use software to count 'marks', or votes, on a paper ballot. Could you program a scanner to tally say 60% of the marks in a particular race for candidate 'W. Bush'? Of course. The county checks the scanners both before and after the election, and the scanners show '0' votes at the start of each election day. But somebody might insert malicious software code that would only be 'active' during polling hours and go slink into the night after its dirty work was done.

I'm not a computer geek, but I have read reports done by others who are expert and believe the risk of touch screens is too great. I agree.

Let's hope that this November every eligible voter will be allowed to cast a ballot (no caging, Tim), the voting system nationwide will be ready to handle overwhelming turnout (don't bet on it) and the winners will be the ones who truly got the most votes.

Want to be part of the process? More poll workers are needed for the November election. Contact your county election commission and volunteer to be a poll worker. In Pulaski County you'll get paid $90 for a 14-hour day plus another $25 if you attend poll worker training. If you won't help, don't complain when you have to stand in a long line this November to cast your ballot. I'll be one of the folks dealing with the crush.

And please, please don't wait until election day to update your address or check to see which races you are eligible to vote in. Voters make it harder on themselves by waiting until election day to resolve problems and then going to the polls before they have prepared themselves to cast that all important vote.

This is a test.

A reader commented, while our server wasn't working properly:

I tried to comment on the post mentioned above, but I got a TypePad
error "No such entry '13686'." Perhaps you should get the crack Arkansas
Times IT Department on the case.

Anyway, what I was trying to say was:

You know, above and beyond the (quite large) problems I have with these
machines' reliability, hackability, security, etc., it just seems like
they're beyond the capabilities of mere mortals to program correctly.
I've lost count of the number of stories about these machines that
feature not malicious tampering, but what is apparently plain old Barney
Fife bungling. A race that wasn't on the ballot? I can understand such
an error in a paper ballot situation where there is a lot of lead time
to consider (and surely the staff of a newspaper can appreciate that,
right), but on what's really a form of computer? I'd be on the phone to
my sales rep demanding some customer satisfaction.

I've only used a touch screen once. I followed it okay but I really had to concentrate. It was hard to read but I am pretty blind...

Thankfully they ditched it and returned to paper...

You. Cannot. Trust. Touch. Screens.

I'm considering voting for any candidate of any party who pledges to outlaw touch screen voting machines. The paper ballots that you mark the box and then a machine scans them and counts the votes work perfectly. You even have the sheets available to audit each machine that counts the votes. And the ones that get rejected can be counted by hand to make sure those votes get counted too. (Unless somebody votes for two candidates in the same race or something like that, then that ballot has to be tossed out.)

So many states switched to the new machines because of Florida's debacle. But, Florida was the only place with that problem. So they were the only ones that needed to make changes.

ES&S and TypePad are disenfranchising the people.

Mr. Happy- the M100 scanners used in Pulaski Co. are able to detect an 'overvote', where a voter marked more than one person in a race or choice on a ballot question, like a constitutional amendment. When that happens the paper ballot gets kicked out by the scanner before the votes are recorded. The scanner produces an audible tone to alert the nearby poll worker monitoring the scanner and the scanner indicates the problem- an 'overvote'.

That voter has several options- one is to 'spoil' the ballot. The voter is then given a replacement ballot by a poll worker and hopefully marks it correctly the second time around. Records are kept of all spoiled ballots to account for every ballot at the end of each election. By law voters can only get 3 ballots total in the event they spoil multiple ballots.

Another option for the voter is to reinsert the same ballot into the scanner with the help of the poll worker and have the scanner accept the overvote. In that event the vote in that race would not be counted since voters can of course only vote once in each race or on each ballot issue. But all other correctly recorded votes would be counted.

Hope this helps.

We only hear about the problems that are detected. Mistakes are only detected when there is a recount or an obvious error (more votes than voters). How many mistakes go undetected though? If the race in Conway had not been close enough to allow a recount, would it have ever been caught? I don't think so.

(Trying to post again. TypePad, like the Democratic Party, apparently gets the benefit of the doubt.)
You know, having covered elections before for the Benton County Daily Record, I remember being somewhat amazed at how cavalier some officials were about voting irregularities. Sure, they have to deal with the public, which as we all know will contain someone who can be counted on to find a way to screw up just about anything, no matter how idiot-proof. But there was also a lot of shrugging and calling it an inexact science. Of course, this was always grist for the "I got robbed" class of politicians, Benton County having its share and more of. But usually the races in question were small potatoes, and passed over for mention in the media outside the confines of the county. Now, of course, we're learning that the problems are a lot more endemic than we thought, and we're learning that disputed elections can lead to eight years of disaster.

Did it occur to any of the election commissioners to test the machines before election day? The law requires the machines be tested before election day. How was this done? A simple test (not one provided by ES&S) of sample ballots voted into each machine, hand tallied and checked with machine results would have found both problems before election day. What's the old saying, "An ounce of prevention..."?

What is wrong with the good old fashioned paper ballots?