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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."
I would be rereading the contract, fighting to get my money back, and think hard about suing for damages.
Does the manufacturer really have no responsibility for these costs at all? $3 million is a friggin' lot of money for tax payers to spend for something UniLect screwed up.
This blows my mind. Yes, an error message "sort of" pops up in among all the other commands. And here I am worried that I'd better make it super-obvious when an error might cause a score to be lost in an educational training drill. AARGH!
From the article:
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. If the machine worked during early voting as it did on Tuesday, the message could have appeared hundreds, if not thousands, of times.
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.
After Bev Harris catching the elections officials red-handed disposing of ballots, poll-logs, and other interesting documents on Tuesday, I suspect things may get interesting down there as well. Even more interesting, it's the same people who had -16K votes for Gore in 2000.
Who knows, it may even make the newspapers someday.
-- MarkusQ
How odd. Someone modded the parent post "overrated" even though it (at this point) hasn't had any other moderation.
I suspect who ever did it didn't bother reading the linked article (which details the events to which I refered). In short, they went to pick up copies of the records to which they were granted under their Freedom Of Information Act request. They were instead given newly generated records (the printer had date stampted them). They pointed this out, and were told they would have to come back the next day to get photocopies of the real data. They came back the next day (ariving a bit early) and found the elections officials doing something in the warehouse that involved black plastic garbage bags. They were told the bags were "on the way to the shredder"; it later turned out that these bags contained the official records, which did not match the "copies" they had been given.
Not that that's suspicious or anything.
-- MarkusQ