Florida E-Voting Machine Fails

cmason32 writes "An optical voting machine memory card failed earlier today in Daytona Beach, Florida, sending election officials scrambling to secure the 13,000 paper receipts. Without the paper ballots, all 13,000 votes would have been lost. Considering how close some predict this election to be, losing that many ballots would be catastrophic. Let's hope that we won't see any more of this in the next 24 hours, and that these problems are fixed before 2006."

Comments

List of irregularities

[thelenm]

ABC News has a continuously-updated list of irregularities from around the country.

On the radio this morning, I heard something about a couple thousand votes already present on some electronic voting machines in Philadelphia before the poll workers arrived in the morning. But I can't find any stories about it online. Does anyone have any more information on this?

Re:List of irregularities

[RandomCoil]

This has been on CNN (TV) for a while now. Supposedly "Republican observers" noted that machines at one location had registered 1300 votes before the polls had opened. "Poll officials" and some "impartial observers" checked the machines. The 1300 votes were actually the votes cast using that machine over its lifetime, not number of votes recorded today.

The mayor of Philadelphia seemed to think this was Republican shenanigans. I think it's more likely that the observers had one two many double espressos this morning.

Re:The voting machine in Pittsburgh

[x4A6D74]

The reason is that those machines are no longer being produced. Worse than that, parts for them are no longer being produced. Bad enough yet? How about this: the company went out of business about 25 years ago. If anything ever breaks, the county calls up a local machine shop to replace them ... and special orders like that can be pricey (I have a friend who's the GM of such a shop).

That would be the reason that a) those machines are not becoming more widespread and b) PA is thinking about phasing them out.

Besides, mechanical vote counting machines just aren't 1337 enough for this day and age. ;)

(I live in the Pittsburgh area and my mom volunteers at the polls in my district, so she got to learn this stuff.)

BTW: The machine doesn't actually record the votes on paper, I think. My mom said that there's a readout on the back (think car odometer) and a roll of paper for the write-in votes. The pollworkers have to unlock and open up the machines at the end of the day, all read the numbers off (so that everyone knows no one's cheating), total the several machines at each polling station, and then fill out some paperwork to be taken to the county courthouse.

Just another local's opinion.

--0x4a6d74

Re:These are the good electronic voting machines

[Karma Farmer]

It's probably just superstition, but removing a single chad seems much less ambiguous than the various bubble-filling exercises

Unfortunately, removing a second chad is remarkably simple and is a wonderful way to spoil a ballot.

Of course, someone with access to the ballots can selectively spoil bubble-ballots too. I suspect they're more difficult to spoil accidentally-on-purpose without being caught by an election monitor, though.

Re:Lesser of two evils solution

[isotope23]

Well, if case you haven't been following the news, the Reps and Dems are proposing checkpoints INSIDE the country.

From the article :

"McCain envisions erecting physical checkpoints, dubbed "screening points," near subways, airports, bus stations, train stations, federal buildings, telephone companies, Internet hubs and any other "critical infrastructure" facility deemed vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Secretary Tom Ridge would appear to be authorized to issue new federal IDs--with biometric identifiers--that Americans could be required to show at checkpoints. "

So I'd say stop the terrorists AT the border instead of making me show papers inside the country.

Votes stored in RAM?!?!?!?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

News for the programmers of that system- volitile memory may not be the best place to buffer 13,000 scanned ballots- you should be writing to disk after every scan.

Re:These are the good electronic voting machines

[MindStalker]

http://www.co.leon.fl.us/elect/samples/2004/G1.pdf
example of bubble sheet.

Re:I'm concerned about lost votes.

[Unknown Lamer]

Are you in Maryland? If you are, she was right. You are not allowed to vote on a paper ballot unless it is a special vote (absentee, etc.). A few people tried to use provisional ballots earlier in the year and their votes were ruled invalid (they even appealed to the State Supreme Court and the ruling was upheld). At least in Maryland, you have no choice but to use the Diebold machines.

That said, I doubt that there could be much vote changing by Republicans in Maryland simply because Maryland always goes Democrat by a fairly large margin. If it went Republican it would raise huge red flags and even if the Republican Party were trying to be evil they couldn't in Maryland (note the use of the subjunctive before calling me an evil Republican hater).