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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 feel that this is going to make a lot of us look a little less paranoid. I've been telling people for years about how bad it is, some of them have been interested, but it's so easy for people in this country to kind of roll their eyes and insist that everything will always work and everyone will play by the rules, because they wouldn't let it happen any other way.
We can use this as an example of just one of the many problems on Nov. 2, and if they end up doing a new election, how costly it is to make mistakes or use untrustworthy technologies in voting. Then segue to Florida and Ohio...
Designs a machine to continue to receive and process votes even when such votes can't be stored!?!?
Does that REALLY have to be spelled out in the design document? (And was it?)
Jack Gerbel, president of the California company, said in response to the letters that the machine was set incorrectly to store too few votes. He called the problem "a mistake of omission" on the part of a UniLect software engineer. But he said that a warning message should have appeared on the machine when it was full.
At least these guys can come out say what went wrong. Do we have any statement yet from Diebold or ES&S? Forgive me for asking, but how hard is it to count votes? This isn't the 80's anymore - hardware is cheap. I'm having a hard time figuring out why storage is apparently such an issue here. I can't remember the last time an ATM machine forgot/lost my PIN number. Powerball machines leave adequate paper trails. Come on.
Maybe the recounts in New Hampshire and Ohio will shed some light on the issue.
A state agriculture commissioner election do-over, not on Election Day, when there is no election for President or any other high office going on at the same time?
Don't worry. 17 people will show up, all relatives of one candidate or the other. I think they will find a way to get it done.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Municipalities no doubt *hate* to have to redo an election. So I'm sure the result of this snafu will be to ensure that either, A) This sort of fuckup of our votes never happens again, or 2) They can't be compelled to redo an election the next time this sort of fuckup of our votes happens.
Anybody wanna take a guess at which of these outcomes is vastly more likely than the other?
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
OVC needs the support too (cash and serious programmers). Visit their web page .
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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
Exit polls have never really been considered that reliable, especially not for close elections. With a nearly 52% against slightly under 49% split in the electorate, this was undoubtedly a close election.
Again, it's a close election, and just because Zogby was very close last time doesn't mean he's going to be that close this time. Remember, we're talking about a 3.5% difference between the results and what Zogby predicted. That's not unreasonable. I'd be pretty pleased if I was Zogby right now.
See above. Same principle as for Zogby. It was a close election.
It isn't a rule, it's just a trend, and can be affected by many factors. The conservatives ran a pretty effective smear campaign against Kerry that damaged his reputation. The Bush team ran a campaign to raise people's fears about terror, lied and exaggerated Kerry's record on these issues, and did so effectively. This would have had a significant effect on undecideds.
Again, this isn't a rule, merely a trend. Right wingers routinely encourage supporters to lie about who they've going to vote for, just to screw with opinion polls.
The ARR isn't a rule, and if it was, it would be completely insane. You'd expect the candidate with the highest approval rating to win. Charles Manson isn't going to be elected president, regardless of the approval rating of the candidate he's running against.
Kerry should have won. He was a great candidate. But he was the target of a concerted smear campaign, he neither defended himself strongly enough nor attacked Bush on the main issues that effects Bush's credibility. So it's not inconceivable that he was seen as the worst of two evils.
This has little to do with anything. It was a close election, but Bush won by more than a million votes.
I'd have thought that was a smoking gun too, except that one of the most unpleasant aspects of US politics is that the technology provided to people to vote usually varies widely from county to county based upon the people who live there. Poorer areas are more likely to have cheaper or older systems. Rednecks will want one thing, concerned liberals another. It is highly likely that the exit polls were affected not by the technologies in use but by the people being asked the questions.
No, the youth vote has been taken into account. Nobody is disputing the above. It just wasn't enough. There was a strong conservative christian turn-out.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I'm confused. What is the advantage of paper? Everyone keeps saying "OH, it's necessary," but why?
If the voting machine spits out a piece of paper the voter gives to some random person, does that make the voting process any more secure? The paper doesn't identify them, but they could look at the piece of paper and know what they punched and somehow find voter fraud? Then, they can feel safe that this piece of paper won't change, and the random person will put the paper with no hanging chads in the ballot box and not stuff the ballot.
What if you gave the precinct worker a CDWORM? would that be the same? You could still give it to the random worker, and then you could even put your name on your ballot, but then you can't *see* what you gave the random worker. So what? At least your name is on it, and it makes it a little harder for the random poll worker to change it. Of course, you can't see the holes you punched, but after the paper comes out of the ballot it's pretty much greek anyway.
If you don't see much difference between the piece of paper and the CD, or think the CD is better, I think you will have a hard time finding a difference between *not* handing the CD to the random vote taker, and just putting your vote on a disk drive.
Somehow I suspect that the error in electronic voting will be far better than the manual processes. Geez, if you don't believe that, why are you reading slashdot! Or why are you a techie! Get a new profession.
Ed Barbar, President and General Manager, Furnit USA
For those who don't remember, our previous (elected) Ag commissioner, Meg Scott Phipps, is now is the Federal Pen for doing some bad things. Ag Commissisoner does a lot of stuff in North Carolina, and if the republicans win it, it'd be a big upset.
I'll gladly vote again.
Jay | http://oldos.org
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