TN Voting Machines switching votes?

[CmdrWilkens]

In a companion piece to the WV vote switching thread I give you the Decatur County Chronicle:

Several Decatur County voters are concerned about problems with the voting machines at the Election Commission Office. Voters claim they tried to vote for McCain for President but the machine checked Obama instead.

At least three voters encountered the problem when casting their early ballot on Saturday morning. Franklin Boroughs says he intended to vote for Republican but rather the computer had checked the Democratic candidate instead.

Wanda and Barney Blasingim similarly said they tried to vote for McCain but the machine switched the vote.

“I noticed the problem immediately,” Wanda said Monday. She says she touched the “button” for McCain a second time and the problem was corrected. Her husband said he asked for assistance from election workers and was told the error sometimes occurs when a person’s finger touches close to the line of the box the candidate’s name is in.

While Blasingim maintains that his finger was not on the line, Election Commissioner Rick Box said the trouble may be that when a person is standing in front of the machine, it may appear their finger is poised over one button but it is actually closer to the button above.
“The way the machine is set up, when you are standing in front of it and seeing it at a certain angle, it looks like you are touching the middle (of the button) when you are actually touching the line above it,” Box said.

Box and fellow Election Commissioner Grafton Dodd tested the machines on Monday. Dodd could not be reached for comment but Box said he found the area of the screen where the buttons for President are located are extremely close together. He blames the problem in part on poor design by software programmers, and adds that there may be sensitivity issues with the screen itself.

Election Registrar Irene Campbell disagrees. She said there was no problem with the machines, though at the urging of state officials machine technicians were called in late Monday afternoon to investigate the problem. Technician Terry VanEaton from Way Point Wireless pointed out that there are ways that this technology can be improved by enhancing ballot design. But they currently function as they have in prior elections.

Box said although there are opportunities to review your choices before finalizing your vote his main concern is that elderly people or those who are in a hurry might accidentally vote for the wrong candidate. “We need to be sure that everything possible is done so that people are voting for who they wanted to vote for,” he said.

Campbell said pointer devices are available to voters who wish to use them rather than touch the screen with their fingers. She added that no other problems have been reported with the voting machines.

Though problems may be few and far between in Decatur County, some wish to go back to paper ballots.

“We should go back to voting the way we used to and forget about these machines,” Blasingim commented.

While I don't doubt widespread issues of intentionaly disenfranchisment efforts do occur after episodes like this I'm even more willing to chalk up machine vote-switching to human error.

[General Zod]

It's making it look like criminal negligence more than anything. It CAN'T be that fucking difficult to write the code for a voting machine so that it actually does what it's supposed to.

[CmdrWilkens]

Honestly I think its the problem with touchscreens everywhere. When you calibrate them you are setting them at a given height and distance. Change either of two variables and suddenly pressing close to the edge of a button becomes perilous. So long as we are using touchscreen technology this will be a problem.

[General Zod]

Honestly I think its the problem with touchscreens everywhere. When you calibrate them you are setting them at a given height and distance. Change either of two variables and suddenly pressing close to the edge of a button becomes perilous. So long as we are using touchscreen technology this will be a problem.

Apple can get touchscreen technology right, so can any number of tablet PC makers. So why is it so hard for them to make these correctly when so many other companies can do it just fine? If it's this complicated for them they should abandon the touchscreen interface altogether.

[Johonebesus]

There was a growing momentum behind fears of voter fraud in 2006, until the election. Then even left leaning sites had headlines like, "So much for voter fraud." At the time, I couldn't help but wonder if the republicans could have stolen the elections and kept Congress but chose not to. As the past two years have shown they had nothing to fear from a Democratic Congress, and by losing the Congress they were able to get most people to dismiss the fears of cheating voting machines.

There have already been reports of machines switching votes from Obama to McCain, and people are remembering similar reports from 2004. Maybe some republican decided to cause this error now, precisely to elicit Zod's response, so that when we hear more accounts of McCain gaining votes, people will remember this story and say. "well, it's not intentional." After all, is there any way a few switched votes could get Tennessee for Obama, especially now that the error has been found?

Maybe I'm being paranoid, but I just can't dismiss the thought out of hand.

[phongn]

Apple can get touchscreen technology right, so can any number of tablet PC makers. So why is it so hard for them to make these correctly when so many other companies can do it just fine? If it's this complicated for them they should abandon the touchscreen interface altogether.

Calibration also depends on viewing angle, how the press is done, etc. It's not actually a trivial task to do (and personal computers and phones are helped since only one user generally uses them).

This doesn't change the fact that these machines are incompetently designed, of course, but some of these tasks are not as simple as they appear.

[Lonestar]

Honestly I think its the problem with touchscreens everywhere. When you calibrate them you are setting them at a given height and distance. Change either of two variables and suddenly pressing close to the edge of a button becomes perilous. So long as we are using touchscreen technology this will be a problem.

Yeah, that shit is just too hard to figure out. Thus the complete failures of ATMs, iPhones, credit card swiping thingies at grocery store cash registers...

[Teebs]

Yeah, that shit is just too hard to figure out. Thus the complete failures of ATMs, iPhones, credit card swiping thingies at grocery store cash registers...

Slightly off topic, but do American ATMs actually use touchscreen technology? If so, how very strange...

[Darth Mall]

Honestly I think its the problem with touchscreens everywhere. When you calibrate them you are setting them at a given height and distance. Change either of two variables and suddenly pressing close to the edge of a button becomes perilous. So long as we are using touchscreen technology this will be a problem.

Yeah, that shit is just too hard to figure out. Thus the complete failures of ATMs, iPhones, credit card swiping thingies at grocery store cash registers...

Working at a Walgreens in the Photo department, you would be surprised how many people can't figure out how to use the touch screens. You get people who poke at it with their nails, registering nothing, people who fuck up and order 100 8x10's instead of 4x6's and wonder why their order costs $50 and all sorts of things. And don't get me started on the touch screen credit card things. People grab the pens by the very end and try to spear the screen, missing the button they want all the time. mainly this is older people, but even younger people screw it up alot.

Yeah, that shit is just too hard to figure out. Thus the complete failures of ATMs, iPhones, credit card swiping thingies at grocery store cash registers...

Slightly off topic, but do American ATMs actually use touchscreen technology? If so, how very strange...

Some do, but often times, its an LCD screen with button next to them

[SirNitram]

Some do. You never hear about this many problems with them.

Then again, once you start this walk, you start asking very basic questions. Why touchscreens? Why networked? Why so horrifically badly programmed? Why so easy to hack?

And while there's no smoking gun in asking simple questions like these, it does indicate that the companies making them, ones who either still do, or were spun up from, companies making things like ATM machines, are either outrageously underperforming, to the point of spite, or actively criminal.

[phongn]

Some do. You never hear about this many problems with them.

Oh, you'd be surprised. Especially for touchscreen ATMs (which have all sorts of calibration issues.)

Then again, once you start this walk, you start asking very basic questions. Why touchscreens? Why networked? Why so horrifically badly programmed? Why so easy to hack?

Touchscreens allow a generalized UI and are mechanically robust. Networked for faster updates. Badly programmed (and by implication, insecure) because software development is an incredibly immature field. Plus, without performance specifications for these machines, I bet there's no real incentive to spend a lot of money hardening them.

And while there's no smoking gun in asking simple questions like these, it does indicate that the companies making them, ones who either still do, or were spun up from, companies making things like ATM machines, are either outrageously underperforming, to the point of spite, or actively criminal.

I strongly doubt that companies are actively malicious. Instead, they are simply incompetent.

[Masami von Weizegger]

Isn't there a confirmation screen? Like, "You have selected Obama/Biden. If this is correct, press continue, if not, press back"? If not, why not?

[phongn]

Isn't there a confirmation screen? Like, "You have selected Obama/Biden. If this is correct, press continue, if not, press back"? If not, why not?

The machines I've used have the user have to manually move forward himself, and then there's a summary screen at the end.

[bilateralrope]

Since a person having their finger to close to the edge can cause errors, why isn't there a buffer area around each box which, when pressed, does nothing except tell the user to put their finger inside a box ?

[phongn]

Since a person having their finger to close to the edge can cause errors, why isn't there a buffer area around each box which, when pressed, does nothing except tell the user to put their finger inside a box ?

If there are enough candidates, there's no room for such a buffer.

[Uraniun235]

[non-directed]

What the hell is so horrible about (non-mechanical) paper ballots? You fill in the bubbles and they run it through the Scantron machine just like the ones they use at your local high school. If the machine gags or some joker wrote in a write-in candidate, it gets manually counted by a human. If the race is stupid-close and there's call for a re-count, all the paper ballots are still there waiting to be re-counted. If the voter's a cripple that can't work a pen, you get a Democrat and a Republican and a [third_party_member] to watch while the voter tells an elections official how he or she wants the ballot filled out.

How the fuck can this be so fucking difficult? Who came up with this fucking bullshit? Do I seriously live in the same country as these cockclowns?

And while there's no smoking gun in asking simple questions like these, it does indicate that the companies making them, ones who either still do, or were spun up from, companies making things like ATM machines, are either outrageously underperforming, to the point of spite, or actively criminal.

Profiteering, I imagine. Why spend $50,000 on quality control when you can spend $25,000 for "almost there" and burn the difference on hookers and blow?

[Ender]

Why does it even need to be touchscreen? What's the mater with a series of buttons?

[Stark]

Touchscreens in these apps confuse the shit out of me. Aside from it being easy to sell to stupid project managers (SO FUTURISTIC) it usually doesn't do anything you couldn't just use physical buttons around the screen to do with far more reliability, and I had the quaint idea that when designing an interface reliability would be more important than style.

In Brisbane they trashed the old train ticket machines (5s to buy a ticket to the city) and replaced them with huge touchscreen monstrosities (5s to stop the screensaver, massive parallax error, options so limited 5 buttons across top and down one side would suffice) at huge cost for no reason, and everyone hates them. It's senseless.

[salm]

I guess they like touchscreens because they´re more flexible. If you put buttons on a machine you´re stuck with that amount of buttons. With touchscreens you can create as many buttons as you want to.

That said, even though touchscreens have been getting better in the recent years, most of them still annoy the hell out of me because they´re so unprecise.

[General Zod]

I guess they like touchscreens because they´re more flexible. If you put buttons on a machine you´re stuck with that amount of buttons. With touchscreens you can create as many buttons as you want to.

You can always make two of the buttons a "next page" and "previous page" function. Surely it couldn't be that difficult to program, and it's not as if ballots would have a that many choices anyway.

[salm]

I guess they like touchscreens because they´re more flexible. If you put buttons on a machine you´re stuck with that amount of buttons. With touchscreens you can create as many buttons as you want to.

You can always make two of the buttons a "next page" and "previous page" function. Surely it couldn't be that difficult to program, and it's not as if ballots would have a that many choices anyway.

Ah, yeah, i was more replying to starks comment about machines in trainstations.
I agree that regular buttons would be better on voting machines. Pen and paper would be even better than regular buttons, though.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Why not create a custom keyboard for this? All you need is to have three buttons; one for each candidate, and then an enter key. Make the buttons large and no one can do a stupid mistake. If a mistake does indeed occur, then the people who made the device are definitely trying to commit fraud.

[General Zod]

Ah, yeah, i was more replying to starks comment about machines in trainstations.
I agree that regular buttons would be better on voting machines. Pen and paper would be even better than regular buttons, though.

Maybe, though pen & paper leaves a bit too much room for mistakes, imo. Plus button-based rather than touch-based machines are almost impossible to fuck up, since there's no room for "calibration" errors.

[salm]

Maybe, though pen & paper leaves a bit too much room for mistakes, imo.

How? I´ve never had problems with filling out a ballot and can´t see how someone could have. It´s not really that much harder to make a cross than it is to push a button.

[General Zod]

Maybe, though pen & paper leaves a bit too much room for mistakes, imo.

How? I´ve never had problems with filling out a ballot and can´t see how someone could have. It´s not really that much harder to make a cross than it is to push a button.

It's easier to miss something or forget to check a box on paper than having a machine tell you you skipped something with an error message.