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Touch-Screen Voting Snags Continue
Not every electronic voting machine misstep comes from Diebold; reader zznate points out that the Virginia machines came from Advanced Voting Solutions (dcw3 butts in: "The slogan on their home page really gives you a warm fuzzy: 'Helping Shape American History for over one hundred years.'"), as well as that the EFF won a decision for an accelerated court date of November 17 in their attempt to stop Diebold from shutting down sites that make the infamous memos available. Let's all hope this is the first in a series of many wins for the EFF against the Diebold folks and crappy e-voting schemes in general. Have you donated lately?"
Reader meadowreach writes points out more trouble on the other coast: "From news.com: 'As voters in California go to the polls, the state is launching an investigation into alleged illegal tampering with electronic voting machines in a San Francisco Bay Area county.' Diebold upgrades software without letting the state know? How reassuring."
Generic Guy writes "CNN is running a story about California not certifying the Diebold voting machines and instead opening an investigation into the use of uncertified systems. Maybe there is still hope for democracy in the U.S."
And from Cambridge, Massachusetts,
Peter Desnoyers writes "Cambridge uses an optical scanner system, where you fill out SAT-style ovals with a pen and the election officer feeds them into a scanning machine. From last night's preliminary results on the Cambridge website:
'In two precincts at 7:55 and 7:59pm the memory cards reached capacity. To ensure that every ballot was counted , the Election Commission has decided to rerun the ballots for 9-1, Lexington Avenue Fire House and 11-3, Churchill Avenue. We expect that it will take between one to two hours.'
I interpret this to mean that they took all the paper ballots out of the box and ran them back through the reader. (with a bigger memory card?) In the mean time, voters were able to continue voting and no votes were lost."
I don't vote. Otherwise I would be pissed off.
I predict, however, that even with all the errors and whatnot, the machines will still see fit to elect an affluent, politically moderate, white male.
I'll start giving out my votes once they start giving us candidates.
I know, Halloween was last week. Its still funny.
This Modern World Comic.
Because this is America, where money is more important than democracy. If a mistake can cause people to lost track of money, that's a big deal. If a mistake can cause people to lose track of votes, no biggie, right? Get your priorities straight.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I'm in favor of killing all exit polls, myself. Why should people who vote later in the day get to have more information about how the election is going so far? A person voting in the morning should have just as much access (or lack thereof) to information about how other people have voted as the person who votes late in the day. It shouldn't be possible to
let something like that influence votes. (Especially when there's no punishment for a news agency that lies about it, as happened in the previous election when the major networks were giving the illusion that they knew who was winning the election, even though their statisticians kept telling them the results were inside the margin of error and shouldn't be trusted - hence the many flip-flops announcing the "winner".)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.