Voters in Jersey could use computer touch-screens to vote in the future following changes made in the States. The new measures are designed to make it easier for people to vote in public elections. Politicians approved studies to decide whether electronic voting at polling stations was something the island needed. The measure is one of several changes being brought into the Public Elections Law.
Lowndes County supervisors plan to seek bids to buy new voting machine system that scans paper ballots. Supervisors on Monday approved a request by county purchasing clerk Terry Thompson to solicit bids, The Commercial Dispatch newspaper reported. The equipment would replace a TSX electronic voting system that has been used since 2005 to process votes digitally. Mississippi received federal funding in 2005 for TSX systems as well as maintenance and technical support. County circuit clerk Haley Salazar said in September that money for support and upkeep will not be provided after this year and that going back to paper ballots would be more efficient for voters, poll workers and election commissioners.
The Australian Electoral Commissioner Ed Killesteyn, in his first interview since the AEC lost 1375 ballot papers in the Western Australian senate recount, has admitted that the public’s confidence in the AEC has been damaged as a result of the debacle. Speaking with RN’s Breakfast, Mr Killesteyn said that the ‘gravity of the situation’ had not been lost on him. ‘Nearly 1400 Western Australian electors have had their Senate vote disenfranchised and I apologise unreservedly to all those electors,’ he said. ‘We’re left with a nagging and almost irreconcilable doubt about the outcome of the WA Senate election.’ Mr Killestyn added that a shift to electronic voting, where a vote is registered straight away and can’t be tampered with, was ‘inevitable.’
The Australian Electoral Commission’s (AEC) loss of 1,375 ballot papers for the West Australian Senate count was an unfortunate failure from an agency that already faced growing public pressure to do away with paper and pencil voting. Even before the ballots disappeared, newly minted MP Clive Palmer was loudly calling for the introduction of US-style electronic voting machines. Meanwhile, an experiment with internet voting for people with disabilities in New South Wales in 2011 caused many to question why we all can’t vote from home. But before we pulp the paper ballots, it’s worth considering what — if anything — is actually wrong with the system as it stands, as well as what the pros and cons of the alternatives may be. Australia’s current procedures for recording and counting votes have essentially remained unchanged since federation. Voters are given a piece of paper and a pencil with which to record their voting preference, and the completed ballot papers are then placed in a sealed box.
Three years ago, I wrote of the controversy surrounding the use of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) in India. A study by 2010 EFF Pioneer Award winner Hari Prasad and others showed that the EVMs could be hacked. For his troubles, Prasad was charged criminally for alleged theft of the EVM that was studied. The charges against Prasad have long since been dropped, but the controversy surrounding India’s electronic voting machines continues. Some have advocated that the EVMs be abandoned completely, and that India should go back to using old fashioned paper ballots. Others have claimed that the EVMs can be made more secure, but only if a Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) is added. For a significant time, the Election Commission of India continued to maintain that the EVMs were tamper proof. However, a number of different lawsuits were brought challenging the use of EVMs without VVPATs. The most significant was a public interest litigation action brought byDr. Subramanian Swamy. Yesterday, the Supreme Court of India ruled in favor of Dr. Swamy, reversing an earlier ruling by the High Court of Delhi.
India’s Supreme Court has directed the country’s Election Commission to introduce a paper backup of votes cast through electronic voting machines, but allowed the commission to introduce it in stages during general elections next year. Political and civil rights groups in India have been demanding that the EVMs should be equipped with the facility to print the running record of the votes for the purpose of verification, particularly after some researchers claimed that the machines could be hacked. The court, overruling a decision by a lower court, described the paper backup or paper trail as an “indispensable requirement of free and fair elections.” As the commission has to handle 1 million polling booths during a general election, the court permitted it to introduce the facility “in gradual stages or geographical-wise” at voting booths of its choice. The commission submitted in the court that the machines could not be tampered with, but was still planning to introduce a Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail system, and had tested the systems in smaller elections.
A state appeals court on Monday upheld New Jersey’s use of electronic voting machines, but the judges expressed serious concerns about possible human error and ordered further review of the state’s safeguards. Monday’s ruling, which upheld a lower court decision, is the latest in a legal battle dating back to 2004 when state Assemblyman Reed Gusciora and others sued over the state’s use of the machines. The lawsuit claimed the touch-screen systems, called direct recording electronic voting machines, were unreliable because they didn’t produce a paper backup and were susceptible to hacking. Then-Gov. Jon Corzine signed legislation in 2005 that would have required all machines to be retrofitted with a paper backup system by January 2008, but that deadline wasn’t met and in 2009 lawmakers suspended it indefinitely over a lack of funding.
How will voters cast ballots in the future? “That is the million-dollar question when I meet with other election officers and directors,” said Utah Elections Director Mark Thomas. In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), making available billions of dollars in funding for states to purchase electronic voting machines — then new and controversial technology aimed at eliminating a repeat of the hanging-chad debacle of the 2000 presidential election. “The manufacturer is no longer building them,” Thomas said of the 7,500 electronic machines the state purchased with its $28 million. “The parts will get scarce, and the technology will become obsolete. We’ll work through that as best and as long as we can, but at some point we’ll have to do something different.” That “something different” has yet to be clearly defined — but as current machines age out of use, counties and states will be on the hook to devise and fund their own changes. “Money is a big driver,” Thomas said. “We had HAVA money a decade ago, but that has since dried up. “We wish we had a crystal ball,” he added.
Americans love their democracy. As soon as one election is over people start campaigning for the next one two or four years away. There is no other nation on this planet as keen on elections as Americans. In 2000 Arizona held a primary election with the option of internet voting. This was a world first and was thought to completely revolutionise voting as it was the first legally binding public election. The only problem was all Macintosh computers failed to register a vote when users thought they had registered a vote. People were not happy to have their democratic right as a citizen taken off them because of the technology. This disenfranchisement and failure of the voting system is a major reason why we do not universally have internet voting or other forms of electronic voting today. Electronic voting also has drawbacks. It was detailed after the 2000 Florida Presidential election when the new computer ballot system in some of the counties did not leave any paper trail. This did not allow a manual hand recount when the need arose. No computer system is foolproof. Computer systems can have errors or a polling place may lose power. If there is no paper trail there is no way to check and verify a count.
It’s nice to see that Australia’s new digital minister is looking to technology to solve the issues plaguing the nation, but moving towards a system of electronic voting is a needless and expensive solution to a problem in process. On ABC News Breakfast this morning, Malcolm Turnbull floated the idea of electronic voting machines to reduce the number of informal votes cast at last weekend’s election. “About 6 percent of Australians voted informally in the House of Representatives,” Turnbull said. “The overwhelming majority of them, what scrutineers have told me over the years is 90 percent plus, have voted informal either because they have just marked ‘1’ against a candidate who they favour and not filled in the other boxes, or they have filled in the other boxes incorrectly. “I think this is a very big issue, and one of the ways that can be dealt with is if we consider electronic voting.” Oh, dear. For a man who Prime Minister-Elect Abbott claimed “virtually invented the internet” in Australia, I would have expected a longer memory on the issue of electronic voting.
Another election is winding up, so it’s time for the compulsory round of people complaining that the system is flawed and that technology would magically fix some of the problems. Quite a few are troubled by the pencils, including Clive Palmer, who listed pencils as part of his comprehensive spray against Australia’s “corrupt system”. He told AAP:
“There’s absolutely no way I will win based [on] voting irregularities and the security of the ballots. We think it’s a corrupt system. Until that’s sorted out Abbott won’t be getting any legislation through the Senate with our support.”
But the Australian Electoral Commission has good reasons for using pencils.
“The AEC has found from experience that pencils are the most reliable implements for marking ballot papers. Pencils are practical because they don’t run out and the polling staff check and sharpen pencils as necessary throughout election day. Pencils can be stored between elections, and they work better in tropical areas.”
Besides, if someone intent on defrauding the election broke into the room where the ballots were stored overnight, do you think the best mode of attack would be to erase votes one by one, in a way that couldn’t be detected?
Dented, dinged and dated, New York’s battleship-gray lever voting machines have been hauled out of retirement because the city can’t seem to get the hang of electronic voting.Follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook for news and conversation. The board is using the lever machines for the coming primary elections because of their quicker turnaround. About 5,100 old machines, each weighing more than 800 pounds and made of 20,000 parts, have been lubricated, and the names of candidates from 2009 (Michael R. Bloomberg, anyone?) have been removed and replaced with those of this year’s contenders. But there is a question no one can answer for sure: Will they work? “I’m very nervous about it,” said Councilwoman Gale A. Brewer, who leads a City Council panel that monitors the Board of Elections. Ms. Brewer’s interest is personal as well — she is one of four candidates in a hotly contested Democratic primary for Manhattan borough president. The lever machines to be used on Tuesday were acquired in the 1960s. In 2010, they were replaced with a $95 million electronic system that uses optical scanners to read paper ballots. But after long lines and chaotic polling scenes in 2012, as well as problems producing complete election results, the State Legislature this year authorized the return of the lever machines for the primary and any ensuing runoff, though it insisted that the city make the electronic machines work for the November general election.
Although he brought success to his once-dying business, money is not the only thing driving Gao Haiyan. The young Chinese entrepreneur was moved by the sight of day laborers drawing rickshaws and being turned away at a local government office. Gao, 35, is now attempting to spread electronic voting systems to a populace long distrustful of politics. China remains governed under the one-party rule of the Communist Party and always ranks low on the Democracy Index, which measures the state of democracy in 167 countries. The Chinese government has not moved forward with political reform to realize free, democratic elections. But Gao, founder of a Shanghai-based company that develops and sells electronic voting systems using mark sense cards under the Quan Hui Tong brand, noted that many elections are held in China. “More than 100 million people are estimated to vote in residents’ committee elections each year across China,” he told a planning meeting of a major appliance maker.
Many in India still have not come to grips the serious consequences of the status quo that the Election Commis-sion (EC) is maintaining by buying hundreds of thousands of Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) that are easily manipulatable. Most constituencies in India are won by thin margins. In current election scenarios where no party has absolute majority, this can have a very drastic effect. Just take this scenario: Let us say without any EVM manipulation (say paper ballots), Party-1 would have secured 175 seats and Party-2 secured 145 seats. Now, how can this election results be manipulated. Let us identify 15 constituencies where seats are known to have been won by thin margins. Now all it takes is to manipulate as small as 5 percent of EVMs (or even much less) in these 15 constituencies to tilt the favor from Party-1 to Party-2. Each party now have 160 seats and neither has majority! So, we changed the whole power scenario by manipulating just a tiny portion of the EVMs in a handful of constituencies.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a series of legal challenges to the narrow election victory of President Nicolás Maduro, closing a chapter in what has been a bitter aftermath of the vote to replace the country’s popular longtime leader, Hugo Chávez. The court also ordered the opposition candidate, Henrique Capriles, who lost to Mr. Maduro by one and a half percentage points, to pay a fine of $1,698 for insulting government authority by challenging the election results and accusing the judicial system of bias in favor of the government. It said that was the maximum fine allowed. The court also asked the national prosecutor to open a criminal investigation of Mr. Capriles on charges of offending the authority of government institutions.
In his State of the Union address in February, President Barack Obama introduced Desiline Victor, who, at 102 years old, had waited in line three hours to vote in North Miami, Fla. The president lauded Ms. Victor’s commitment to democracy, but he left out a key fact about her hardship: Compared to some voters, she hadn’t stood in line all that long. In 2008, for example, students at Ohio’s Kenyon College waited as long as 10 hours to vote, with some casting ballots at 4 a.m. The 2000 election meltdown in Florida pulled the curtain back on our dysfunctional system of voting, offering a primer on just about everything wrong with American elections, from burdensome voter registration to faulty vote tabulation. The crisis inspired repeated efforts at reform. A few, such as the Help America Vote Act of 2002 — which, among other things, provided funds for better voting machines — even made a modest difference. Yet three presidential elections after the 2000 fiasco, the basic mechanics of our democracy remain deeply flawed. One reason so little has changed, clearly, is that plenty of powerful people prefer a system that makes it hard to vote. But there have been some real reforms in the states, many won with bipartisan support, and there is room for well-crafted compromises. Improving elections may not be easy, but it is possible.
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The Election Commission has ordered two lakh additional electronic voting machines (EVMs) to meet the shortfall in the event of early Lok Sabha polls being held along with assembly polls in five states due later this year. “We have ordered around 2 lakh voting machines to meet the shortfall,” a senior EC official told TOI. The two lakh machines, to be supplied by BHEL and ECIL by September-October, will be in addition to the nearly 14 lakh EVMs already in possession of the EC. Half of these 14 lakh machines date back to pre-2006 period and may be prone to snags. They can take only 800 votes each, unlike the post-2006 EVMs with which around 2,000 voters can vote.
Elections Canada said this week that it hopes to test Internet voting in byelections after the 2015 general federal election. If the tests are successful, the agency could adopt this form of voting in all federal elections. Elections Canada is on a perilous track. The use of computers in democracy’s most important exercise, voting, is subject to two serious dangers: inadvertent glitches and deliberate tampering. Montrealers know all about the glitches. So do voters in most of the 139 other cities and towns across Quebec that also used electronic equipment in their 2005 municipal elections (either for counting votes, as did Montreal and Longueuil, or for both voting and counting, as did Quebec City). In Montreal’s case, 45,000 ballots were counted twice (only later corrected), and election results were hours late. Snafus were also rife elsewhere. Quebec’s elections agency wisely responded to the fiasco by suspending use of such technology until it could be shown to be foolproof. Logically, this should mean suspension in perpetuity: Computers will never be risk-free.
The Election Commission plans to have electronic voting machines developed in Thailand ready for use at the next general election, EC secretary-general Puchong Nutrawong said. He said the equipment is being developed in coordination with Aeronautical Radio of Thailand Ltd. The latest version could cater for up to 30 candidates at a time. The voting buttons were bigger than early versions and the candidate ballot numbers would be clearly lit up. Only the numbers of actual candidates would be available for selection. Once a number is selected a paper slip would be printed out to reassure voters that the machine has actually recorded that particular number.
The election for Ward 1 alderman in Canton is going back to the voters after a Circuit Court judge ruled Tuesday that illegal voting and voter intimidation occurred in the May Democratic primary. After a two-day hearing, Judge Forrest Johnson Jr. of Natchez said the will of the voters could not be determined through the May 7 ballot box. He ordered the election results for Ward 1 alderman be tossed and a new election called while allowing Rodriquez Brown, who won the June 4 election, to remain in office. “Whether one agrees or disagrees, the evidence I heard is disturbing to say the least,” said Johnson, who was appointed to hear the case by the Mississippi Supreme Court. “For poll workers to endure what I’ve heard is not right.”
State Rep. Bert Jones, R-Rockingham, has been pushing this session to force N.C. counties that use electronic voting machines back onto paper ballots. His House Bill 607 initially required this shift, but the bill was amended this week to simply call for a year-long study of the issue, as well as a moratorium on new voting machine purchases in the interim. That bill passed the House last night, with Jones’ support. It moves to the Senate, but House members have said repeatedly this session that the Senate hasn’t been willing to pass study bills. Sometimes these studies don’t accomplish much, but they can cost a little money.
Board of Elections members expressed their opposition Wednesday to a bill in the General Assembly that would require the use of paper ballots in all North Carolina elections, a move that could cost Henderson County half a million dollars to implement. “I’m just amazed by this,” said board member Bob Heltman. “I’m perplexed. (It) sounds foolish as hell to me.” “I don’t think we need to be stepping back in time,” agreed Chairman Tom Wilson, referring to the days when illegibly marked paper ballots had to be hand-examined by elections officials, slowing returns. House Bill 607, sponsored by Reps. Bert Jones (R-Rockingham) and Justin Barr (R-Albemarle), would require that all state boards of elections tally paper ballots using optical scanners and would prohibit the use of touch screen voting systems currently used by Henderson and 35 other counties.
Nepal’s plan to purchase Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) from India for the Constituent Assembly polls in November has hit a road block after the Indian side made it clear that the EVMs were not equipped to cater to such a large number of contesting parties. Indian EVMs can handle a maximum of 64 candidates (or parties) — so far, 139 parties have registered with the Nepal Election Commission to contest the November polls, thus making it difficult to use the machines from India. “A control unit, a kind of software, already installed in Indian EVMs, handles a maximum of 64 buttons for different political parties, so we cannot use the EVMs developed and used in India,” Nepal’s Chief Election Commissioner, Nil Kantha Uprety told IANS.
In Sunday´s elections, voters in the Lima district of Cañete used an electronic voting system that proved efficient. According to statements given to Andina, participants took only 30 seconds to complete the entire voting process. It is simple and efficient, allowing the results to be released more quickly. The head of the ONPE (Office of Electoral Processes) told Andina that Pacarán, Cañete is an example of the future of voting in Peru: “We congratulate the population of Pacarán that participated in this day of democracy: using new technologies, such as the electronic vote, allows the voting process to be more secure and flexible, today showed us that we can use technological innovations that the world is currently using.”
Queenslanders who fail to vote in State Elections will continue to cop a fine after the Newman Government decided not to scrap compulsory voting. But the Government will eventually make it more convenient to vote, moving to introduce electronic, and potentially online voting, within six years. Attorney-General Jarrod Bleijie yesterday announced Cabinet had decided against removing fines for voters who fail to show up on polling day. It comes after The Courier-Mail revealed in January the Government was reviewing compulsory voting among other reforms. Other changes include a new requirement for voters to show proof of identification at the polling booth, a move that could affect pensioners.
The Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, Attahiru Jega, on Tuesday assured that the Commission will improve on its performance in the 2015 general elections. Mr. Jega stated this during the public presentation of INEC Strategic Plan (2012-2016) in Abuja where the Deputy Chairman, Senate Committee on INEC, Alkali Jajere, ruled out electronic voting in the 2015 polls. Mr. Jega, who was responding to the suggestions made by the leaders of some of the political parties that INEC should sit up in order to ensure smooth and successful polls, come 2015, said the Commission would be transparent and accountable to retain the confidence stakeholders have in it.
The Central Electoral Commission, CEC, has abandoned the planned use of new pilot technologies in the June 23 parliamentary elections, after tests revealed problems. The Electoral Code mandated the CEC to pilot two new election technologies for these elections: an electronic voter verification system, EVS, in the district of Tirana, and an electronic counting system in the region of Fier. But according to a CEC report 11 per cent of the identity cards tested could not be read from the machine. Tests with the EVS system in Tirana revealed that the system could not read deteriorated IDs or prevent attempts of multiple voting at different voting centres.
The government’s plan to use electronic voting machines (EVM) in 119 of the 240 constituencies during the upcoming Constituent Assembly (CA) elections has been rendered moot. The Indian Election Commission has said it will not be able to deliver EVMs as per Nepal’s requirement any time soon. Currently, the India-built voting console has only 64 voting switches, while the number of political parties entering the CA election fray is likely to surpass that figure. The Election Commission (EC) has registered 139 political parties so far. Although India is planning to upgrade the EVMs to accommodate 384 candidates for its 2014 general elections, it is unlikely that the plan may materialise any time soon.
After Nicolás Maduro narrowly won Venezuela’s presidential election on April 14th, his chief opponent, Henrique Capriles, immediately disputed the result. Two months later, the government is still struggling to put the issue of its legitimacy to rest, both at home and abroad. The latest attempt came this week from the president of the National Electoral Council (CNE), Tibisay Lucena. She claimed that a laborious audit of the tallies produced by electronic voting machines against the paper receipts that correspond to each vote had confirmed that Mr Maduro had indeed won by 1.49 percentage points.
The city’s runoff elections would be scrapped in favor of instant runoff voting under a bill being introduced Wednesday in the City Council. Backers say the new automatic system could avoid the trouble that’s been sparked by the difficulty of holding a primary and runoff two weeks apart with electronic voting machines – and save $20 million every election cycle the city spends on runoffs. They also say it would be more democratic because turnout is typically tiny for runoff elections, much smaller than for primaries. “This whole debate would all be unnecessary if we simply had instant runoff voting. We would save money, we would save time, we would save headaches,” said Councilman Brad Lander (D-Brooklyn), who is sponsoring the bill along with Councilwoman Gale Brewer. “This would enable more people to participate in the runoff.”