And a new study by Common Cause and the Century Foundation finds that 10 very vital swing states have significant voting problems that have not been addressed since the last election.

Those 10 states, according to Common Cause, are Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Missouri, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.

In Colorado, 20,000 left polling places without voting in 2006 because of crashed computer registration machines and long lines. And this election day, Colorado will have another new registration system.


http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/18/voting.problems/index.html

Between issues like this, or stories about the number of ballots that are not counted or lost, why does it still boggle people when voter turnout is so low? About the only reason I bother to vote is to make a point. How many of those provisional ballots do you suppose are carefully counted and included?

Can someone explain to me why individual states have to complicate the process of voting sooo much!

In Canada we use a paper ballot that has BIG boxes to allow almost all voters the ability to put an X in them with a pencil.

If a voter needs help due to a handicap to place their vote the deputy returning officer can assist that person. Even a friend or relative that takes an oath at the voting station can help a person make their vote.

Here is a sample of our paper ballot:
http://www.elections.ca/gen/ces/images/paper_ballot.gif

Elections Canada (http://www.elections.ca/home.asp) is a federal institution that oversees all of our elections. Other contries aroud the world use Elections Canada as a model and in some cases Elections Canada farms out its services to countries that either don't have an effective election system in place or require assistence - Haiti comes to mind in the recent past:

http://www.elections.ca/content.asp?section=med&document=declaration1406&dir=pre&lang=e&textonly=false

All ballots in a ballot box are hand counted then the ballot box totals filter up to a final riding total. The national level looks at ridings (or parliment seats) won for a party and the first party to the "post" (number of seats won to indicate a minority or majority victory) claim the day.

I have never had to wait longer that 20 mintues to vote and the proess is extremely simple. The people at the voting stations are polite and curtious and go to every length to accommodate the voting public.

I just don't understand why it is so complicated down in the States.

Cheers,

Neither do we. Well, other than suspected criminal activity.
http://www.guerrillafunk.com/thoughts/doc000023.html

Loka, we have a lot more people down here, for 1 thing. When you add more people into the mix, the average IQ drops, exponentially.

Paper ballots can be stolen, set on fire, and ballot boxes can be stuffed with false votes. They aren't foolproof.

Regardless, there will always be a (hopefully) healthy skeptcism when it comes to voting.

Paper ballots can be stolen, set on fire, and ballot boxes can be stuffed with false votes. They aren't foolproof.

Whats your point Sixee?

Any system can be subverted. Machines can be hacked, damaged, wires cut, etc. Paper ballots are not alone when it comes to tampering.

If you have system that allows ballot boxes to be stuffed or set on fire then its the ingreity of the people running the system (i.e. - a countries own citizens) that need to be scrutenized, not the ballot process.

I guess my real question is this, why do the states have such differing voting procedures across the nation when a federal program could homogonize the process and bring a better or at least a consistent baseline to how Americans vote.

Hanging chads in one state, a lever that is broken in another, blue screen of death on computers in another state, spitting into a bucket of your candidates choice in Oaklahoma, its all very inconsistent and leaves voters to question the actual results when they are released.


Cheers,

It has to do with States Rights. Each state is very independant, and the differences in the voting process is one way each state exercises its independance from the others.

'E Pluribus Unum' as the saying goes...

When you add more people into the mix, the average IQ drops, exponentially.

Oh, really?

Oh, really?
Ouch!


Otherwise, with an electronic voting system it simply takes one person to write one little piece of coding wrong, either intentionally or not, and there goes a whole election. With paper ballots the results can always be checked and rechecked...as far as burning them...well...someones got to notice that no ballots came in from west podunk :confused:

Meh, I should have written, 'the total IQ drops'....:(

I guess my real question is this, why do the states have such differing voting procedures across the nation when a federal program could homogonize the process and bring a better or at least a consistent baseline to how Americans vote.




Money!

Get the legislature to appropriate funds to upgrade your balloting procedures, and then you will have something different from your neighbor. And maybe there will even be some left over for other stuff.

Also, if you own an electronic balloting company, or any kind of balloting company different from the sort used in a specific state, lobbying to get a switch to your brand is a money deal for many.

Could it be that lobbyists for the varying styles of balloting materials have kept our national congressmen and women from standardizing the process?

And, could it also be the fear of a major scandal such as could easily be found with electronic balloting that has kept us from standardizing?

I think it's important to realize that voting fraud is as old as voting itself. No matter what the system, people have found ways to cheat it.

Laying the blame on the shoulders of electronic voting is probably not reasonable. In fact, I think electronic voting could be the most secure possible way of voting, if implemented correctly.

Just think of all the crucially important things we trust to online and/or computerized systems. If computer systems were so inherently prone to fraud, banks would be using all paper.

The problem is that we tolerate these amazing levels of outright fraud from our elected officials and their cronies...

Oops, American Idol's on, I'll finish thinking about this later!

When you add more people into the mix, the average IQ drops, exponentially.

Meh, I should have written, 'the total IQ drops'....:(


I think you managed to get more wrong each time. Did you mean to reference the idea that a group tends to behave like its dumbest members?



Laying the blame on the shoulders of electronic voting is probably not reasonable. In fact, I think electronic voting could be the most secure possible way of voting, if implemented correctly.

That being said the currently available electronic voting machines are horrible.

And strictly, yes, nobody seems to actually know why voting is such a complicated and bloated mess here. Individual elections often get it right ... city council voting might have 10 candidates in some places and yet people figure it out. By and large, it appears that numerous organizations enjoy the benefits non-transparent voting as applied to significant offices and do their best to keep it that way.

Given who those people probably are and the other results of federalization in the last twenty years I somehow don't think a Federally organization sanitation effort would necessarily work. There are more grass-root efforts like http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/ , I'm hoping they find traction.

And that's just talking about the method of logging your vote, not fixing the two-party ballot problem with something like a single transferable vote.

Meh, I should have written, 'the total IQ drops'....:(

I think you need to go stand in the corner, add up the IQs of the US and Canada, and get back to us when you manage to make the Canadian total less than the US total.

That being said the currently available electronic voting machines are horrible.

Oh, I'm definitely not defending our current voting machines. If those guys worked for a private company, they'd have been fired years ago. Hell, Indian outsourcing would probably result in higher quality code.

Those Diebold machines use an Access backend. Seriously.

Those Diebold machines use an Access backend. Seriously.
Holy shit, Access is the devil and a blight on our society. Not only is it one of the poorest products ever to come out of Microsoft (and that is saying A LOT) it's security checks and balances are almost NIL.

If you ever have a manager at work say "lets just make an Access program for it", you should promplty reach for your tazer and blank out his/her memory. Repeat the conversation / tazer stunnings until words like MSSQL, Oracle or MySql are uttered.

I really can't beleive that an Access database could and would make it into your voting system. It makes hanging chads look like a very minor inconvenience ;(

Cheers,

Take a look at this movie for the Access backend and some of the trivially easy ways that they found to hack the machines: http://ayonae.com/hacking-democracy-t11260.html

I think it's important to realize that voting fraud is as old as voting itself. No matter what the system, people have found ways to cheat it.


Indeed, and I was living in fabulous Laredo, TX, when Henry Cuellar's cronies *literally* stole the election from Ciro Rodriguez several years ago. What happened was this. It was a very tight election (Rodriguez won by 100 or so votes), and Cuellar called for a recount, which was permitted due to the closeness, but when it came time to do the counts, there was an unusual delay with the recounts from two counties, and a period where the Webb box was unaccounted for. To everyone's shock ;), when the recount was completed, the boxes for all 17 counties involved in the election showed totals within 1 to 2 of the original counts... *except* Webb (Cuellar's own town) and Zapata (south "suburb" of Laredo, where many folks who work in Laredo live) counties, which uncovered an additional 287 votes... which *all* happened to be for Cuellar, which gave him the US House seat. A similar story can be told (involving the same counties ;) ) for Lyndon Baines Johnson's Senate run in 1948 (and his previous House and Senate races btw, and in that election there were an estimated 10,000 fraudulent votes for Johnson here in Bexar county (San Antonio) alone), so we are certainly no stranger to election fraud here in South Texas.

That having been said I'd feel much better with a standardized paper ballot system (which by its very nature is limited in the *size* of the fraud that can be conducted) than an electronic system wherein massive changes can be made in the blink of an eye.

Regards,
Nydia

I only recently watched that Robin Williams' movie where he was a talk show host who ran on a whim, more or less, for President, and won due to the computer program involved with the electronic voting.

Not a bad movie, considering the casting.

Did you mean to reference the idea that a group tends to behave like its dumbest members?


That's what I was trying to say. In my defense, I blame Jedd for making me think like he does...:o

In my defense, I blame Jedd for making me think like he does...:o

/pities Sixee

The lack of a centralized oversight combined with partisan owned voting machine companies compounds the problem. I believe there are enough honest people in the world that something like this should be possible, if both parties didn't have reason enough to block the action.