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Aftermath Of Failed Electronic Voting

Posted by timothy on from the how-do-you-recount-an-electronic-ballot dept.

dstates writes "The Christian Science Monitor and NPR report that failed electronic voting machines lost thousands of votes in Carteret County North Carolina, and the election for state agriculture commissioner is headed to court. A combination of human error (setting the machine to record a maximum of three thousand votes when eight thousand people voted) and a software malfunction (the machine kept accepting ballots after its memory was overloaded) resulted in the loss of 4,500 votes in an election decided by only 2,300 votes."

4 of 84 comments (clear)

  1. More evidence by js7a · · Score: 1, Interesting
    Dr. Werner Lange finds about 60,000 apparently fradulent inaccuracies in the absentee ballots alone. More here at Daily Kos.

    Kerry weighs in at the last moment.

  2. And still more... by MarkusQ · · Score: 1, Interesting

    If you do the math on the machine shortages, it becomes clear that, just by fudging which precincts get more machines, and which get fewer, someone could set an arbitrary absolute cap on the number of votes a candidate could get, by forcing their strongholds to be resource-limited rather than voter-limited. A little more math shows that this effect could be sufficient to tip a close race. If you look at the distribution of the long lines and the votes in Ohio, it becomes hard not to believe that this was in fact done.

    If you look at the racial pattern of the lines, it also starts to look like whoever did it was a racist jerk.

    --MarkusQ

  3. Re:... I've been reading about this, and ... by Guppy06 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "Why you would have a maximum number of votes for a machine AT ALL."

    To throw up a red flag if it looks like some individuals voted more than once.

    "Why you would have something like a memory contraint AT ALL in these days of cheaper-than-dirt storage."

    Lowest bidder.

    "Why you would have either or both of A and B if you wanted a fair election."

    It's not a fair election they're after, it's the appearance of a fair election that really counts. After Florida 2000, electronic voting appeared to be more fair, so viola.

    "D'you think it's because North Carolina was John Edwards' home state, mebbe"

    And this has what exactly to do with a state office? Besides, North Carolina is a Southern state and nobody should be surprised by the ~30% margin Bush/Cheney won. Sure, it's not quite South Carolina, but it sure as hell ain't Massachusetts either.

  4. So which story is right? by jc42 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    All the reports just after the election claimed that these votes were lost because the machine ran out of memory. Now we're reading the explanation that someone set a max-votes limit to 3000.

    Are the reporters really so clueless that they don't understand the difference? Or maybe they do understand, but half of them are trying to put something over on us?

    I notice that TFA's explanation is "... an exhausted poll worker failed to notice a "memory full" caption on a machine, ...". But the slashdot abstract says "... setting the machine to record a maximum of three thousand votes ...", which conflicts with the article's explanation.

    So which is it? Inquiring minds want to know ...

    --
    Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.