North Carolina May Redo State Election

goombah99 writes "The North Carolina Observer reports that due to failure of computerized voting system to properly record votes after its memory cards filled North Carolina may have to redo the November 2 statewide election. They believe 4400 votes were lost and from this have decided that only the State Ag commissioner race must be re-run. Still it's going to cost them a lot, indeed its going to cost them about the same price as 1000 new voting machines (3 million dollars) , or about $750 for every lost vote. Guess they wont be able to afford a paper trail system now."

Comments

After RT "rest of the" FA...

[the_skywise]

So the article says "The counter hit 3,016 before the warning message came up. It went on and off, as Sanderson worked the control panel to accept more votes" Okay, so you had stupid user error:

"But county elections workers said the message was hard to see. Sanderson said a precinct worker could easily miss it while setting the machines.

L.E. Pond, chairman of the local elections board, was ready with pages copied from the UniLect instruction manual. The warning appears mixed in with other commands, he said, with no explanation of what to do if it pops up."

Oh man... so it came up with an "Out of memory error" but the manual didn't say what to do. So it's "not their fault. It sounds like you could set the software to more votes (say like 5000) and it would accept them, but keep putting up an error box saying that it couldn't save them and did this for EVERY vote and was ignored...

3 million sure would help OVC

[goombah99]

Apparently the state is willing to cough up an unnesseccary 3 miilion now and then. Shame they did not just give it to the Open Voting Consortium. The OVC systems are open source and have paper trails. They even cost less to buy let alone the cost of redoing an election.

OVC needs the support too (cash and serious programmers). Visit their web page .