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

Vindicated

[schlach]

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...

What kind of idiot engineer

[the_skywise]

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?)

I like honesty

[adamh526]

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.

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 .

Re:If I were North Carolina

[goombah99]

I have read elsehwere the company makes two models a 3016 vote model and a 10,000 vote model. The county bought the cheaper ones. Thus presumbably they cant sue because they were aware of the different machine types and since they had the option to contact for more capacity. On the other hand they could sue for the sloppy inadequate warning system, but it might be hard to win. My Isuzu does not have a sign saying it may lose control if I drove it 120 miles per hour but it probably would.