The mail: the voting machines work, the problem is the voters

Most of this week's e-mail was about the new optical-scan voting machines that were demonstrated Tuesday in Pinellas County. I asked in a column and a blog post whether we were just trading one set of problems for another.

From a poll worker in a county that already uses them:

Your comment about the possibility of a bottleneck at the machine is unfounded.  I was required to be in constant attendance at the machine and never experienced a backup to use it.  It is easy to use and practically foolproof.  It gives the number of voters using the machine at all times and the best part is the paper backup in case of a recount.  All the paper ballots for that precinct are locked in a bag and kept locked in that bag until the count is verified and accepted.  The precinct captain is responsible for the delivery of the ballot bag to the precinct headquarters at the end of the day. -- Jeannine Seals

Thank you for being the voice of experience. I certainly agree about the advantage of having the paper ballot as a paper trail (although we haven't changed our law yet to allow them to be used in a recount). As for making sure there are not problems in the polling places, as always, it depends entirely on the training and procedures that each county's elections office puts in place, seems to me.

The vast majority of precinct poll workers are conscientious, hard working people.  However, to expect them to learn an entirely new system in the amount of time being made available, is not very realistic.  I predict that if the new systems are rushed into service and used in the 2008 presidential election, there will be many, many problems.  Then at the end of the day, the rest of the nation will once again be looking at Florida and shaking its head.  Who can blame them? -- Michael Ross

Thanks, Mr. Ross. See comment above on the importance of training and procedures.

Would a "none of the above" or "no vote by choice" selection solve the undervote problem? -- Kay

Kay is referring to the fact that the optical-scan machines will accept a ballot even when it is not marked in all races. The touch-screen machines at least ask the voter whether he or she intended to leave the ballot blank.

The optical-scan machines CAN be programmed to warn about undervotes. So you could include a "no vote by choice" option in every race, and then program it to reject a ballot where there wasn't something marked in every race. The tradeoff would be longer ballots and, I imagine, a lot more delays at the scanner, when voters didn't fill out every race and had their ballot spat back at them. But again, a friendly instruction by the poll worker when handing the voter a ballot would cut down on that as well, I suppose.

How does the scanner handle smudges or inadvertent pen marks on the ballot? And, like old paper ballots, can't these be purposely ( and fraudulently) marked in a recount? Or, would this be a scanned recount? Hate to say it, but punch ballots do work if officials clean out the bin. Also, isn't the under vote problem over-blown? I've used paper ballots, levered voting, punch cards, and touch screens. Got to rank punch and touchers as the best. -- Bill Northrop

What the scanner cares about is whether the little ovals are filled in, or (depending on the company) where the two halves of a broken arrow are connected. Other marks don't matter. (Of course, if your "stray mark" filled in an oval, it would count it as a vote.) Could they be marked fraudulently in a recount? To do that DURING a recount, you'd have to have a pretty massive conspiracy of everybody in the room and all the witnesses, seems to me. Otherwise the ballots are kept under seals with serial numbers, etc. from the time they are collected. As for whether it would be a scanned or manual recount of the paper ballots, that's up to the Legislature -- which, as I said, hasn't even passed a law saying they'll be USED in a recount yet!

The problems with voting in Fl is not with machines, it is with the loud mouthed people who complain but don't show up and vote. -- Lee Carlson, Spring Hill

You said it.

Lastly, this suggestion on a foolproof voting system:

Begin voting , by opening the booklet in front of you . Make your selection by using the serrated metal punch, which goes through a hole constructed of  plastic and metal the directs the stylus for your choice. Your only responsibility is to ensure a metal serrated stylus get through the piece of paper. What could be simpler? -- Sal Reale

Hah! Mr. Reale humorously describes the punch-card voting system that we used until 2000. In fact, the punch cards worked pretty well. We got into trouble only when we had an election where we were trying to measure just a few hundred votes cast out of many millions -- and NO elections system is going to give us that kind of perfection. Touch screens, optical scans, X-marked paper ballots -- if the difference is 537 votes out of 6-million, we'll have court fights, absentee fights, all the same stuff.

Comments

[Chris Brudy]

Dear Mr. Troxler,

Thank you for your interest in the integrity of our elections. I've had so many questions about it that the Pinellas County DEC Chair Toni Molinaro has appointed me to be her Elections Issues Coordinator. There are some things about computerized ballot counts that you should know.
If you have not had the opportunity to see the Emmy nominated "Hacking Democracy", then you haven't seen how optical scanners can be hacked without a trace, and how the hack can be a virus designed to propagate to the tabulation computer where it can steal the whole election.
Maybe the scanners can't be hacked in as many different ways as the DREs can, but they can still be hacked. The fishiest parts of this whole thing are the woefully inadequate auditing procedures. Any statistics professor will testify to the uselessness of the state's requirements. Add the fact that the selection of precincts to be audited is supposed to be random but never is, and instead the precincts are generally pre-selected before the election and thus can be subject to a "Hack and Stack" (search Brad Blog…). Also, any race on the ballot can serve to be audited, so for a presidential election we could be auditing a school board election only. Ok, say we somehow fix those problems (Oh, you bet). There's more: For those of us whom the machine manufacturer lobbyists assume must be as dumb as oxen, the useless audits will not be performed until after the elections are "certified". That is, after the winner is declared. This begs the question: How many clues will we need before we begin to suspect we are being taken for a ride? Are we truly intelligent enough to govern ourselves? Maybe, maybe not.
The hope is that we will wake up in time and start hand counting our own paper ballots. Hand counting takes just a few hours longer, and costs as little as half as much as buying the machines and then having to pay the manufacturer for training, maintenance and ballot programming. Hand counts are self-auditing, are done right in front of everyone's eyes right there in the Precinct right after the polls close and are 99.99% accurate.
For hand counting information, Google Nancy Tobi and/or her "Hand Count Handbook". You'll be amazed at how easy it is to keep the elections irrefutably honest.
We would be insane not to be absolutely certain of the electorate's intent these next elections, given the trends begun by this reprehensible administration. Hand counts can save the Republic from the looming disaster bequeathed us by the Bush regime.

[Chris Brudy]

It has been three days since I posted the comment above. There has been no response from anyone. No one seems to care whether the elections are stolen or not. My conclusion is that we are not smart enough to govern ourselves, and that I am trying to hold back the tide. Goodbye Constitution, hello plutocracy.