Report Outlines Exit Polling Problems
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Two firms that conducted Election Day exit polls for major news organizations reported Wednesday that they found a number of problems with the way the polls were carried out last year, resulting in estimates that overstated John Kerry's share of the vote.
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A series of tactical errors, with peculiarities in the voting process, prevented democracy advocates from winning as many seats as expected in Sunday&#39;s legislative elections, politicians and political analysts said on Monday.
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Many states are facing legal challenges over possible voting problems Nov. 2. A look at some of the developments Sunday:
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Awash in a sea of public opinion polls &#151; national and state, telephone and Internet, independent and partisan &#151; voters must be seeing double by now. And it's about to get much worse as the presidential campaign heads into the home stretch. Those trying to make sense of the swirl of numbers need a "poll survival guide."
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November 6, 2004 â An  Open Source web based Survey tool is playing a key role in keeping track of voting irregularities in todayâs US Presidential Elections. PHPSurveyor (http://phpsurveyor.sourceforge.net), a PHP based online survey tool, is being used to gather data across the United States about all voting irregularities. In the first 10 hours of voting alone, over 13500 incidents had been recorded using the software. The tool was selected by the Verified Voting Foundation as part of their Election Incident Reporting System (http://www.verifiedvoting.org/eirs/) as one of three major system components â all of which are Open Source.    The Advokit tool provides a structure within which campaign leaders can match volunteers to tasks, and manage task completion. The MapServer tool displays clickable maps. PHPSurveyor is used to allow Verified Votingâs thousands of volunteers across the United States to enter voting irregularities and incidents online as the day progresses. Researchers can view the collected data in real time by mining down through a map of the US, viewing incidents at a Nationwide, Statewide, or County level.  PHPSurveyor developer Jason Cleeland said âIâm very excited that my tool is being used for a project of this scale and importance. Itâs an indication both of the success of Open Source as a development strategy, and itâs flexibility in allowing organizations to freely bend an existing project to new uses.â  âWhile PHPSurveyor is generally a tool for simple development and collection of survey responses online, the Verified Voting Foundations âTechWatchâ group of technologists have been able to integrate it with realtime reporting mechanisms that allow legal teams and press across the United States, and the world, to respond immediately to any problems in the Presidential elections as they occur.â  PHPSurveyor was first developed in 2003 by Jason Cleeland in response to his organisationâs need for a better way to run and record surveys. âPaper based surveys were effective, but required a large commitment in terms of staff resourcing,â Mr Cleeland said. âFor a non-profit organisation, finding the time for staff to perform the required data entry was a real problem. Yet at the same time, we had a constant need to run surveys of our members. Writing an online survey tool solved these problems. It eliminated the double-handling of the respondent completing the survey, and a data entry operator transferring that response to computerâ said Mr Cleeland. âInstead, the respondent completes the survey online, and the data is immediately available for review.â  From a relatively basic system, the tool quickly grew a wider feature set. âIt was the release of the software on Sourceforge as an Open Source GPL product that really broadened PHPSurveyors outlookâ said Mr Cleeland. âWithin a matter of weeks some IT developers from a public non-profit TV station in Dallas, Texas had started adding code and providing improvements. And since then, more ideas, suggestions, and improvements have flowed from all over the world on a constant and sometimes overwhelming basis.â  At the time of writing PHPSurveyor had collected over 23500 incident reports on the US Presidential election, with 13500 being entered in the 10 hours since voting commenced. âI expect that by the close of polls there will be around 30 to 35,000 entriesâ Mr Cleeland said, âand that by the time all the paper reports have also been collected the tool will have collected at least 40,000 responses. This is very exciting to watch â to see a tool that was intended to handle around 1000 survey responses, to one that can collect - in a very short time frame â over 40,000 indicates to me the benefits of opening source code to the world.â
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A group of news organizations that commissioned exit polls during November's elections will look closely at a report released Wednesday before deciding the fate of the current process.
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Voters nationwide reported some 1,100 problems with electronic voting machines on Tuesday, including trouble choosing their intended candidates.
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Some highlights from preliminary results of exit polls conducted for The Associated Press and television networks in the New Hampshire primaries Tuesday:
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So-called "paper audit trails" are unlikely to solve accuracy problems associated with electronic voting and would in fact introduce another potential problem to the mix, according to a report issued Tuesday. But even some critics of current e-voting tech are discounting the ITIF's take on the matter.
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Among the security concerns that have been raised is the possibility of someone being able to cast multiple ballots. Other concerns are about a sudden power outage and whether data would be lost in such a scenario.
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Call it the law of unintended consequences. A new national backup system meant to ensure that millions of eligible voters are not mistakenly turned away from the polls this year, as happened in 2000, could wind up causing Election Day problems as infamous as Florida's hanging chads.
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Many states are facing legal challenges over possible voting problems Nov. 2. A look at some of the developments Monday:
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Many states are facing legal challenges over possible voting problems Nov. 2. A look at some of the developments Tuesday:
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Exit polls in key Romanian elections are showing a likely win for the ruling Social Democrats. But as in Ukraine, the opposition has demanded an investigation into voting irregularities.
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PM expected to make final examination of polling data before making decision.
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As officials investigated the human errors that disrupted Maryland's primary election, there were renewed fears yesterday that electronic malfunctions could cause even greater problems in November.
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WASHINGTON - Call it the law of unintended consequences. A new national backup system meant to ensure that millions of eligible voters are not mistakenly turned away from the polls this year, as happened in 2000, could wind up causing Election Day problems as infamous as Florida's hanging chads...