Las Vegas Slot Machines vs Electronic Voting Machines | Hacker News Reader

Las Vegas Slot Machines vs Electronic Voting Machines

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72 pointsjgv28 comments

Scary stuff, but this is from 2006 and not all of these things are still true in all places. (States like CA require access to all software used on machines, for example.)

That said, these comparisons between voting machines and ATMs or slot machines are always a bit unfair. Slot machines and ATMs carefully log and track every action that every user does on them. In a voting machine, it must be impossible to tie a vote to a specific person. This is makes it a much trickier problem to solve.

The problem may be tricky, but surely it's worth solving and doing so publicly. Shouldn't this be doable?

Of all the things i would like to see well-intentioned billionaires do, funding a permanent mission to perfect voting is very high on the list. what greater gift to democracy than provable integrity of its atom?

Here's the other thing, though: voter fraud is incredibly rare. Yes, we could do better. But this is not the most pressing issue of our time.

Really, we may be better off launching a PR campaign to remind people that voting mostly works.

You assert that fraud is incredibly rare -- how are we to know? Did all places start issuing paper receipts that were tallied against the electronic count? Isn't part of the problem that we have no idea how bad electronic voting fraud is, be it prevalent or nonexistent?

It's not jut about whether vote fraud is happening though - its also about the _perception_ of whether vote fraud _can_ happen.

I think it would be worth expending a considerable amount of resources not in the expectation of catching any fraud, but to be able to demonstrate that if there _were_ any vote fraud, there are appropriate means in place to find it.

exactly. to a cynic, of which there are many in the younger population that tends not to vote in the US, "mostly works" can mean "doesn't work" (...so why bother?)

if you KNEW the system was perfect, that alone might be reason to participate.

Actually, we already kinda did that. Attorney General Ashcroft made voter fraud a top priority for the Department of Justice. Yet there were very few convictions nationwide, and nearly all of them were for honest mistakes.

How fast do you forget the 2000 election:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elec...

If you want something less editable than Wikipedia:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1013552.stm

from the outside it looked irregular at least (and some of the voting practices seem very bad).

Here in Uruguay we have a very reliable manual voting mechanism... but if you want electronic, it seems Brazil did it reasonably well (didn't follow the elections that closely, but there's no contest to the voting methods), so you can copy them instead.

Not to mention in the US you don't have direct representation (for the presidential elections), and there are several shenanigans with the voting districts, so, I'd say that voting works less in the US than in several other places.

The 2000 election was an ugly mess because damn near exactly as many people in Florida voted Bush as voted Gore, not because of rampant voter fraud.

Better technology could have helped, for sure, but there is always going to be some small margin of error and this particular race was decided by something under 1/100 of a percent.

I would argue that most modern slot machine software is far more complex and far more production tested than any existing voting software.

There's no possible technical reason why voting software isn't basically bulletproof and transparent.

I am sooooo glad I don't have to vote electronically. Folks here who flip bits for a living know only too well how easy this is to do. Changing a thousand paper ballots? Hard, time comsuming, messy. Changing a thousand electronic ballots? Invisible, silent, quick, untracable...

How exactly do you think those paper ballots are being counted?

Why, electronically, of course. But (1) the original paper ballots still exist and (2) the machines that do the counting are far fewer and are in a secure location. Fraud at this level can be detected by examining a random sample of ballots. Easy to do, since all the ballots are present.

In civilised democracies they are counted in public by lots of little old ladies while inspectors from each party, and any member of the public can watch them.

Of course this does rather reduce the drama and excitement so it might not be suitable for you chaps.

You don't have to change paper ballots, you merely have to replace or "find" them.

I think its worth mentioning that winner-take-all elections prevent you from getting your interests represented. So this whole debate is like fiddling with the alignment of your wheels when the car's no longer on the road.

I voted today. A few of the issues I had to vote on had only 1 choice. (I fill-in the bubble, or, not. WTF.) Several had 2 choices, the RP candidate or the DP candidate. A few had 3-5 choices. A few had a blank line for "write in" choice. This is "democracy" in action today in the USA, folks.

We need proportional representation. I'm pretty sure I'd have better choices with PR. Right now its a choice between people that don't understand economics or real life and people that don't understand economics or real life.

All you need in a voting machine is something that can properly punch the cards. That's what the problem in 2000. You don't need to send the votes over the Internet or store anything on the machine. It doesn't need to be secure.

But you will need a PC that costs a couple hundred bucks. And a card punch machine that has been around for decades. In other words, commodity hardware.

Once you've made your choices and your ballot's punched, you should be able to walk it over to a completely different PC that has a punch card reader. And maybe its got software from a completely different organization. Did it record your choices properly? Confirmed. Now, drop it in the box.

Simple. No possibility for fraud and you got a paper trail.

Nit: You don't even need anachronistic punch card machines, color-in-the-bubble voting forms work just fine. Those are used in even more places than hole punch forms these days, from voting to SAT grading machines. They're even more commodity, more familiar to the public.

Otherwise, agreed.

yeah but using a PC lets the user see their choices clearly and encodes their vote with a single click, instead of having to relate a letter or number to their choice and find the question on the form and then confirm the letter or number before finally filling it in. Grandmothers with shaky hands will have a much easier time.

Alas, the game is rigged in DC and the state legislatures. Regulation as strong as the slot machines is likely to be applied...never, at the current rate of change. So goes the gamble of democracy.

This is probably just a function of slot machines having been around for much longer.

Of course all these same requirements make perfect sense to implement for voting machines.

Actually I believe it's a function that older machines were specifically designed to be either unwinnable (I've seen some old slots, certain ones don't have BAR or 7 on all wheels) or for the odds to be exponentially against you.

When the laws changed and gaming was regulated casinos wanted to make sure they weren't the ones now being cheated.

I disagree. It's a lot easier not to go to Nevada than it is to pick up and move someplace where you prefer the voting system.

I never thought I'd say this, but the US government definitely needs to take a cue from Las Vegas..

In Las Vegas gamblers get no bailouts.

They did, and passed laws that turned Wall Street into the house.

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