E-Voting Glitch: 19,000 Voters, 144,000 Votes

nick_davison writes "The Indianapolis Star is reporting the latest case of 'interesting' E-voting results. Tuesday's Boone County election, using MicroVote software returned 144,000 votes from 19,000 registered voters. After much panicking and tracking down the bug, the actual number of votes turned out as 5,352. With yet another mistake, does anyone still trust closed-source electronic voting?"

Comments

As an Indiana voter...

[Yekrats]

I'm an Indiana voter, and the most recent elections in my county (Tippecanoe County, encompassing Purdue University) were a complete disaster. Yes, we can thank our good pal Diebold.

I went to vote at 7:00 am after the polls had been open for an hour and was turned away because of "computer problems." Apparently one of the "pick X candidates for city council" votes was not allowing a voter to pick multiple candidates. Our election board had to print up paper ballots at the last minute, delaying the opening of the polls for about two hours. When I finally got a chance to vote, it was the good-old-fashioned way: checking off candidates pen and paper, and counted by hand.

Okay, shame on us for not having a backup in place in case the computer screwed up. But the computer shouldn't have screwed up in the first place. Testing, people?

Elsewhere in our county, first the machine neglected to tally absentee ballots in a very close race. Then it was discovered that one of the voting stations put the wrong candidates on the ballot, which may lead to a special run-off election.
http://www.lafayettejc.com/news20031111/20031111 1l ocal_news1068529632.shtml