ES&S electronic voting machines can favor specific candidates
Threat Level reports on problems with electronic voting machines made by ES&S that can register votes for candidates other than the one selected by the voter. While the machines can be deliberately miscalibrated, it's also possible that bad user interface choices can confuse the voters:
Juan Gilbert, who directs the Human Centered Computing Lab at Auburn University in Alabama, said he believes the problem is a usability issue coupled with bad ballot design. He said that on ballots that use a windowbox design with the candidate's name inside a windowbox on the screen, voters tend to touch on the candidate's name, rather than the center of the windowbox. If the windowboxes for two candidates are placed too closely together on top of each other, a voter who casts a ballot for the candidate in the lower box is likely to press on the area between the two boxes, causing the machine to register a vote for the candidate in the upper box. See the video below for a demonstration of his theory.
Report: ES&S Voting Machines Can Be Maliciously Calibrated to Favor Specific Candidates [Threat Level]
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DRE voting machines bad.
End-to-end auditable open-source voting (e.g. Punchscan) good.
Why is this still news?
Why is the debate still framed on voter fraud rather than electoral fraud?
Clearly, "It's a feature, not a bug."
All the problems with 'calibration'? Just means that the 'desired' candidates are not placed close enough to the 'popular' ones.
Why don't we just do away with all this silly individual participation... Throw the voting machine down a hill. If it lands screen-up, all the votes go to one candidate. If it lands screen-down, all the votes go to the other candidate. If it lands on the side, send someone to kick it, because there is no such thing as a third-party candidate...
What is so bad about using pieces of broken pottery to vote? It was good enough for the ancient Greeks. The political machine wants election machinery.
I usually don't favor conspiracy theories to explain fuckups that can be just as easily marked up to incompetence, especially in matters involving government and/or government contractors. However that is no excuse for bad ballot design, especially EIGHT FRICKIN' YEARS after Florida.
I still use that butterfly ballot to demonstrate the importance of good layout to my beginning graphic design students.