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Florida E-Voting Machine Fails

Posted by michael on from the hot-swap dept.

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."

1 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. Title may be misleading. by cbiffle · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The title of this article may be misleading for those who equate "e-voting" with "touchscreen machines."

    The machine that failed was an optical scan machine. This is like a scantron for school exams; it's the type we use here in Arizona. You fill in little arrows and it reads which ones are darkened. There are still paper ballots that go into a lock box under the machine.

    Personally, I don't think this is "e-voting" at all and that the title is just plain wrong, but since optical scan machines do, indeed, use electrons, I suppose it's arguable.