New Mexico Touchscreen Voting Problems

phr1 writes "The Albuquerque Journal reports yet more hassles with electronic voting machines. Early voters pressing the Kerry button have repeatedly found the machine instead putting a check mark next to 'Bush'. The operators of course say it's the voters' fault. It would be just too unfortunate if the machines happened to systematically favor one candidate over the other, heh, heh."

Comments

Go Boston Tea Party on em

[revscat]

Destroy the fucking things. They're a blatant means for whoever, Republicans in this case, to disenfranchise millions of voters and skew the election. Break them. Make them not work. Refuse to use them, kick out the plug, tip it over. Take a big magnet to them, sledgehammer, shotgun, whatever.

Untold numbers of our ancestors have DIED to bring us the right to vote. Such measures as I am suggesting here are no more out of bounds than is locking away a violent criminal.

Take them down. Justice demands it. I paid for it with my tax dollars, and I do NOT care.

Re:Go Boston Tea Party on em

[crmartin]

I'll tell you a little secret -- not much of a secret -- about this. If the machine is clearly showing the check mark going wrong, it's a bug, not a conscious attempt to manipulate the vote.

A long time ago I was a Republican election judge in a Democratic machine county. We were using the punched-card ballots, which get an undeserved bad rap -- they have a lower proportion of bad ballots than the traditional paper ballot.

However, that year the machine candidate for the House was 3000 votes (about 10 percent) behind after 90 percent of the votes were counted.

The Election Commission discovered "computer problems". There's a delay, and afterwards -- voila! -- the votes are re-run and it turns out that the machine candidate has the big margin.

The point? It's not the machines you have to trust: it's the County Election Commission you have to trust.

Human interface guidelines for voting machines.

[Black Parrot]

1. Whatever happens, blame the user.
2. If that doesn't fix the problem, see #1.

Misaligned Touchscreens

[NotoriousQ]

This looks to be nothing more than misaligned touchscreens. The main question is "Are they misaligned on purpose?"

And why won't someone realign them.

Re:Misaligned Touchscreens

[rtaylor]

This looks to be nothing more than misaligned touchscreens. The main question is "Are they misaligned on purpose?"

A better question would be to ask why the order isn't randomized for each new voter?

Re:phr1: Idiot or troll?

[!ucif3r]

3) The Rebuplicans voting didn't actually have any problems and so there were no voters to interview abotu it and the woman they interviewed simply defended the machines by saying people were making the mistakes and that it was happening to everyone. I love how Bush supporters call any news that could possibly be construed as negative towards Bush or the Republicans 'propaganda', but their candidate lying to the country and the world is just a 'mistake'.