Diebold Flops in Alaska

lukej writes "From the Anchorage Daily News, During yesterday's preliminary and ballot measure election across Alaska, Diebold built voting machines failed to 'phone home' causing a hand recount. As a party spokesperson said: "I can say there are many systematic problems with Diebold machines that have been identified in many contexts." Additionally, the state itself has mandated some hand counts of all electronic results, and the Democratic Party is simply suggesting voters request paper voting."

Comments

Re:Seriously guys,

[ms1234]

Keyword is contract and how long they can milk it.

Re:Seriously guys,

[Ulven]

You miss the point. He could write a 'pretty good' voting machine in a day (Or not, that's not the point). Diebold, with all their money and years can also come up with one that is 'pretty good'. It should be perfect. Therefore, on a time/money per quality of product basis, Diebold are worse than useless.

Re:It's harder than you might at first think

[frdmfghtr]

Makes you wonder why they bother with all the added hassle of machine voting at all, really.

AMEN!

I used to be on the electronic voting bandwagon, but when I saw that it was prone to failure and couldn't be trusted, I jumped off. When machines are reported to carry several thousand votes more than there are registered voters in a precinct, how can ANYBODY say "well, the number isn't enough to change the outcome." How do you know this? What about "errors" that go undiscovered? A little here, a little there, all under the radar so to speak...until you put them all together.

Paper, paper, paper...mark your ballot with a black marker, drop it in a box, and it gets counted by a representative of each party. No electronic storage to deal with, no way to electronically change results, and it's a permanent record.

The only two ways it can fail (that I can think of):

(1) The ballot is a misprint in which case it is simply destroyed (again, witnessed by a representative of each party that it is in fact a defective ballot) and a new, blank one re-issued. The ballot is examined to be defect-free BEFORE being handed to the voter.

(2) The marker runs dry.

The only way there can be fraud is if the votes are tampered with after being deposited; since all ballots are in human-readable form, then the ONLY way to tamper with them is also in human-readable form.

We can process millions upon millions of bank transactions every day but cannot count votes without grotesque errors? Come on people! It's not that hard!