Local voting districts seen as crucial to election security

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press


Christina A. Cassidy, Associated Press
 Updated 8:09 pm, Saturday, November 4, 2017

CONYERS, Ga. (AP) — Last November, election officials in a small Rhode Island town were immediately suspicious when results showed 99 percent of voters had turned down a noncontroversial measure about septic systems.

It turned out that an oval on the electronic ballot was misaligned ever so slightly and had thrown off the tally. The measure actually had passed by a comfortable margin.
 
The scary part: The outcome might never have raised suspicion had the results not been so lopsided.

Amid evidence that Russian hackers may have tried to meddle with last year's presidential election, the incident illustrates a central concern among voting experts — the huge security challenge posed by the nation's 10,000 voting jurisdictions.

Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/us/article/Local-voting-districts-seen-as-crucial-to-12331682.php

[Sam McGee]

1. Not so fast

I doubt "the Russians" had anything to do with this.

The screen on touch-screen voting machines consists of a sandwich: The top slice is a thin sheet of flexible glass below which is a conductive diode matrix. When the voter presses the glass, pressure is put on the diode matrix, causing that specific point to conduct electricity. This is how the machine knows for whom the voter voted.

In programming, the machine is set up to recognize that a press on this point is a vote for one candidate, a press on another point is a vote for another candidate, and so on.

Several problems can cause miscounted votes on touch-screen machines.

1. The glass and the matrix are glued together around their edges. If the machines are old, the adhesive may have dried out enough to allow the glass or matrix to shift while the machine is being handled. In this case, the machine may have been calibrated correctly at the registrar's office, then, when the machine was transported to the polling place, the glass or the matrix shifted ever so slightly, causing votes to register incorrectly.

2. The machine may not have been calibrated correctly.

3. There may have been an error in the programming that was not identified during the pre-election logic and accuracy testing.

4. Voter presses the screen the wrong way. At one precinct in our county, during the presidential election, a lady voter went ballistic because the machine was voting for the candidate above the one for whom she was voting. Turned out, she had long fingernails -- REALLY long fingernails. When she voted, the tip of the fingernail was pressing one candidate before the pad of her finger pressed the candidate she wanted, thereby voting for the candidate on the list above her candidate.

Regardless, this is exactly why my state -- Virginia -- has de-certified direct-reading touch-screen machines -- that is, touch-screen machines that count votes. Instead, we have gone to touch-screen machines that print a paper ballot. With these machines, the voter makes their choices on the touch-screen machine which then prints a marked paper ballot. The voter then looks at the printed ballot, confirms their choices, then casts the ballot through an optical or digital scanner. Either way, there's a paper ballot that can be counted.

Usually the most simple and obvious explanation is the correct explanation.

[Scarsdale]

2. In Wisconsin

a few precincts had more ballots counted that there are voters in the district! No wonder Snott Walker is still governor.

[Igel]

3. Most of the time that's tabulation error.

Which is to say, human error.

Somebody entered the same number twice. Somebody put a number in the wrong column or field. Somebody entered a number incorrectly.

Did poll worker duty for a while. No electronics, we used the lever voting machines. We were in bipartisan two-person teams. One team opened the back of the machine. The other team recorded the results. The numbers were read from the tabulator in the back of the machine and they were written down incorrectly. We were done, and somebody said we should double check the results. It seemed silly, since two of us were at the back and two doing the writing, but we did. Turned out we were reading across a grid, they were writing down the grid. We had all the numbers wrong. The presidential race numbers were being recorded for some local office, etc. (If you are familiar with determinants, we had recorded the inverse.)

Mistakes happen.

Ill-will and social distrust makes all mistakes into intentional deceit and a bid for illicit gain. A society with sufficient levels of social distrust is not a society.

Hanlon's razor: Don't attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.

[Scarsdale]

4. Since this happened in numerous

states, are you saying the poll workers are sub-par? Sort of like the tRump administration???

[diva77]

5. poorly written article - author doesn't know enough about ballots and tabulation to give an adequate

description. It sounds like it could be that an optical scanner was not properly calibrated and was incorrectly tabulating votes cast on paper ballots; or was she referring to a DRE with no paper ballot?

The author needs to be more specific about how the votes were cast and counted.