More E-voting Problems in California

thefultonhow writes "Wired News is running a story about Napa County, CA's problems with their new E-voting system. Not only did an optical scanning machine fail to record absentee ballots properly, necessitating a recount of 13,000 ballots, but now Registrar of Voters John Tuteur is saying that the machine used in precincts failed to count 6,692 votes. The incumbent Napa County Supervisor had originally lost his bid for reelection by only 50 votes (the recount of absentee ballots bumped that up to 107 votes), so with nearly 7,000 votes gone AWOL, this is a big deal." The first Wired link above shows that the discovery of the problem was apparently mostly chance: if none of the 10 (ten!) ballots picked for rescanning had exhibited the problem, they might not have figured it out. It also suggests a new strategy for rigging the vote: pass out pens of a certain type in districts unfavorable to your candidate, then calibrate the machine not to read that type of ink.

Comments

New to paranoia?

[Anonymous Coward]

It also suggests a new strategy for rigging the vote: pass out pens of a certain type in districts unfavorable to your candidate, then calibrate the machine not to read that type of ink.

Welcome to the party!

Paranoia is fun!

Re:New to paranoia?

[MrFreshly]

It also suggests a new strategy for rigging the vote: pass out pens of a certain type in districts unfavorable to your candidate, then calibrate the machine not to read that type of ink.

Yeah? Like pens that say vote for "John Tuteur"?

and change into a naked chick when you turn em the other way?

ohh

[grungefade]

So now I understand the Arnold governor thing.

Pens will be provided for the next election...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.pimall.com/nais/dispen.html

Sharpies

[jeffy210]

Damnit, now they're really going to outlaw Sharpies... first CDs now ballots.

Natalie Portman as President

[MooseByte]

"I don't see these e-voting problems going away until geeks start running these kinds of companies.

At which point Natalie Portman, Yoda and the cast of Farscape will unexpectedly sweep the national elections.

EU Patent no. 20485496

[orzetto]

Describing a voting system based on cellulose-derived foil, produced by the processing of arboreal mass, that allows to cast one's vote by imprinting a graphite track on a specific part of the foil.
The said part will be made clearly distinguishable from others by a permanent imprint of organic, chromatically-emitting chemical compounds, which, by using technology covered by previous patents, will convey a stream of information to a biological signal decoder, called eye(tm). While eye(tm)'s come in pairs, this advanced system requires only one, possibly none with minor modifications.
The counting process will be carried out through biological, neural-network-based intelligences, result of a genetic algorithm that has proceeded for exactly 1,048,134,239 years as of April 1, 2004 (Pangea patent no. 00000000000001). A particularity of this process is the ability of computing results maintaining a record of raw data, that is stored in the graphite-marked cellulose foils at all times.