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Diebold Fails Again in San Diego

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the is-digital-democracy-doomed dept.

ptudor writes "An article in today's San Diego Union Tribune reveals nearly 3000 absentee ballots in the San Diego primary one month ago were miscounted. 'The miscounts occurred because multiple scanners simultaneously fed the absentee ballot data into the computer tabulation system. The large number of ballots and candidates on them overwhelmed the system. Diebold spokesman David Bear said the company has provided a software fix to the county for the new problem.' The irregularities were found in a routine post-election review." You can also read more about the problems on election day.

4 of 333 comments (clear)

  1. With electronics, there will always be problems by pholower · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Until there is a way to have two or three safety checks that are electronic, we are always going to see these problems. Have an electronic machine from one company send the vote to its database, and print a "receipt" for the vote out. Then, have they receipt scanned into a system built by a different company, and check the results. The voter can also look at the receipt and verify that is who they voted for, as well, as being double checked to veryify there are no "programming" errors.

    --
    -- johntracy.com, because everybody else is wrong.
  2. Why are voting machines so complicated? by bleublue · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In all this talk about electronic voting machine failures, I still don't comprehend how the process can be so complicated that it has so many failures, requires full featured OS (i.e. Windows), etc... I mean all voting is a position, list of names, select 1 or more (depending on the type of election). Couldn't this all be done with code small enough to fit on a ROM or something that would be almost impossible to tamper with? Even votes could be somehow "burned" into a write-once type of memory. Simple network adapter to transfer the results.

  3. Re:Real counting? by midol · · Score: 5, Interesting
    As a Canadian voter, I recommend the system in use here. All balloting is done with a pencil on paper ballots. All ballot boxes are brought sealed to a central tally point. One Elections Canada staff member counts the ballots. Every candidate has the right to appoint one scrutineer. Any scrutineer can contest any ballot. Any member of the public is entitled to watch the ballots being counted.

    I can't remember there ever being the kind of nonsense that Diebold has regularly caused.

  4. Re:Real counting? by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Sigh... here we go again.... Est. Population (2004) of Canada: 32,000,000 Est. Population (2004) of US: 294,500,000 Area of Canada (in km^2): 9,970,610 Area of US (in km^2): 9,363,520 Canda Population Density per sq km (1997): 3 US Population Density per sq km (1997): 29 Got it?

    No - the UK has almost exactly the same system as Canada (where do you think they got it from?) and likewise has seen no problems with it over the last century or so. However the UK has about twice the population density of the US (~60 million people in less than 10% of the area) and it still works (well, it did elect Blair but that can't really be blamed on the system :-)

    So no excuses - you could fix it with a system that works if you wanted to!