My Voting Machine Malfunction

Typical response from officials, it cannot be the machine it must be you. Over here in the UK it is still the good old paper system where you mark your crosses with a pen and pop it in the post or at the polling station. Re this not being a political video, I agree its not. It's just pointing out the technical issues you experienced. However just like the Brexit issue here in the UK there are always those that like to turn everything anybody says or does into a political issue. On a non related note I am glad to see that Voyager 2 made it to interstellar space. Just a bit difficult to comprehend that it has taken a year for the data proving this to be received here on earth. It puts things into perspective really.

John Russell

From today's (7 Nov. 2019) Bradblog: "In the critical battleground state of PA, there were all kinds of problems with the new ES&S ExpressVote XL systems deployed for the first time to Northampton County (where the systems were said to be operating incredibly slowly and results were reported as 0 for some candidates, as later confirmed by the County) and in Philadelphia, where candidate names were missing and many of the machines reportedly refused to work at all. (But this will all be fine by 2020, right?)" And that's just an excerpt. There were voting irregularities in MANY states! Check it out at http://bradblog.com Maybe I should start my own vlog or blog about this.

Rocco Rizzo

Brad Friedman of the Brad Blog (bradblog.com) has been talking about the inconsistencies of electronic voting machines for a little more than FIFTEEN YEARS! I have been speaking out about this for about the same amount of time. Greg Palast (www.gregpalast.com) has been talking about this for about as long. Palast gets into the voter purge lists, and the Jim Crow 2.0 stuff too. The EFF (eff.org) has been on top of this for a very long time as well. You should check them out, if you are serious, about this issue. We have handed our elections to corporations, so it is no longer a government of WE THE PEOPLE, it's about them. the corporations. Yes, I know that you did not want to make this political, but it IS political. These machines came about as a result of the 2000 election, where Dubya stole the election with the Brooks Brothers riot in Floriduh. Hundreds of paid RepubliCON operatives went to South Floriduh, to interfere with the recount, which was stopped. Had the recount completed, we would never have had Dubya as president, and there would have been no move to have all 50 states give up their elections to the electronic voting companies. I was a voting machine custodian in my town for about ten years when we were still using lever based machines in NY. Those machines could not be hacked in any way. There was nothing wrong with them. The "Help America Vote Act" was merely a handing over of our election system to private corporations. Enough of my rant. If you are serious about this, look at the links that I provided. And yes, it is political. If the way that we vote is not political, nothing is.

Rocco Rizzo

Sorry it took so long for me to start contributing again, but I've been without internet until recently, and am now finally able to log into Patreon a start donating again. I'm very sorry but I'm am Once again doing a Monthly pledge, and the only thing that will stop this pledge now is my death.

, and it is illegal to open someone else's mail. You mark your choices on the ballot, sign it, and mail it back in the "secrecy" envelope. You can be sure it got to the proper officials, because their address was on the envelope, and you gave it to the US mailman. Foolproof. Nothing could possibly go wronnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

Paul Dochow

Come to Oregon. We vote by mail. They send you a ballot in the mail. They know it got to you, because it had your name and address on it

Paul Dochow

My biggest problem with computerized voting machines are that they are vertiable black boxes -- you don't know what else they're doing aside from what you see on the screen. Any computerized voting machine should be open source, with verifiable schematics and code published. That way we can be sure that there's nothing else going on. But, having said that, I much prefer the old mechanical machines they had up in Rural Michigan, or the "scantron" machines they use down here in Florida.

Brendan Meteer

The main problem is all of these voting machines are propriety crap and so no one can examine the engineering for flaws. Really I have no faith in voting machines anyway, how hard it is to put an X on a piece of paper and hand it in? If you are having to make dozens of choices at the same time then it is the electoral process that is broken because where else in life would you have to make a dozen important decisions in less than a minute?

veritanuda

Good on you for paying enough attention to the touch screen processing to notice the “false readings” off the screen triggering other things. It could have been as simple as the screen getting dirty and starting to conduct via extra paths other than the primary one. But they should have a process of fixing things before putting it back into service. Not just “ignore that one, I’m sure it’ll be fine now”! Ewen

Ewen McNeill

Interesting. I'm also like you Fran. Question things, that's a good thing. Have a gooood day....Schmutz und chip...😁

If you want to be even more concerned, it was found that many electronic voting machines used locks that are keyed with one of the more commonly used keys for small enclosures. This was some time ago, but due to the complete lack of independent review of the machines, it would not be surprising if such or worse insecurities still exist. If you are in a state that allows you to register for a permanent absentee ballot, do that, especially if you are in a state like California that explicitly prevents voter ID. Here they literally have to give a person a ballot for whoever they say they are. The only major problem with asbentee ballots here in Califonria is that most have been getting thrown out due to a administrative rule that the signatures on the ballot have to match the voter registration. Yeah, cause everyone counting ballots in a signature expert and 2 samples is totally enough to compare signatures. As far as I know, that is still court with out even an injunction that would stay in place or be followed.

Kadah

Here in Georgia I used the old no paper Diebold voting machine. We are supposed to be getting new machines with a paper “receipt”. But the state seems to be dragging their feet. The commission formed to update Georgia’s voting machines decided to go with a touchscreen based machine made by a company with a good lobbyist. I think this is the same machine you used today. The lone cybersecurity expert opposed this saying that hand marked ballots were more secure. The problem with the paper receipt is that the votes are still tabulated electronically from the machine and the ballot is printed by a machine. The paper is mostly there to make the person voting feel better. Even if there was a recount and they pulled all the paper receipts, and that’s assuming they were kept. The votes are recorded in a barcode. The recount will be done by scanning the barcodes instead actually reading each ballot receipt. There is no real way a human could validate the barcode. Also you don’t vote for just one thing on election day. There are usually several different races and referendums on each ballot. What if someone just removed a race from a few machines in places where polling shows a heavy swing in a particular direction. Who would notice that Dog Catcher Post 3 is missing from the ballot except for a few people.

in Italy we have no problems with voting machines, here they prevent us from voting, problem solved.

MVVblog

Gah, I hate that kind of nonsense. Thankfully we're still pretty much paper here in nz. really nice presentation of all the issues with internet/electronic voting here.. https://stateofit.com/kawaiicon/ - you might have to "save video as" - the server is a bit slow. Really one of the big issue is the people who have oversight/management just don't care/understand what is going on, especially in cases such as yours. Needs to be some serious upskilling here before we should even think about using computers for this purpose :/

Blair Harrison

we just got ES&S "ballot marking devices" in the Austin metro area. very different system, much smaller screen, only 1 ballot question per screen with the for/against buttons ( this election did not have any candidates, only state ballot prop questions and 2 bonds for roads and schools) no issues on the system I used, but everything was only 2 selections per screen

BiggieJohn

Did you call (866) OUR-VOTE to report the problem?

Jac Goudsmit

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver had a segment on voting machines last Sunday. I'm not surprised that there are faulty ones...

Maarten Daalder