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Voting Machines Wreak Havoc in Maryland Elections

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the diebold-and-human-error dept.

An anonymous reader writes, "Voting machines are wreaking havoc in Maryland elections today. From the article: 'Election Day in Montgomery County and parts of Prince George's opened in chaos and frustration this morning, as a series of problems and missteps left thousands of citizens unable to vote or forced to cast provisional ballots... Montgomery County's Board of Elections held an emergency meeting and agreed to petition the Circuit Court to extend voting times until 9 p.m.' It's simply shameful."

9 of 463 comments (clear)

  1. User Error by IPFreely · · Score: 5, Informative
    It's all User Error on this one.

    The people setting up the system forgot to bring along required material to the voting places. Big Oops! Once the material was brought in, it worked fine.

    This has nothing to do with voting machines. It would have been the same if they forgot to bring the paper ballots to a voting location that was using paper ballots instead of machines.

    Move along.

    --
    There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
    1. Re:User Error by jimstapleton · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think that then goes back to KISS. If you only have to remember the ballots and either hole punches or pens, it's not that hard. But when you get to having who knows what along with the machines, it's reasonable for someone to forget something, especially if it's not well documented (and/or they aren't properly informed). There's a lot that goes into this. The big part is, there's a lot of room for human error in this one unfortunately.

      --
      34486853790
      Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
  2. No Big Deal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's cool. I'm sure it worked in all the rich, white neighborhoods.

  3. Re:(sigh) by peterarm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As a Canadian who has read Slashdot for many years, will someone please explain to me what is so hard about voting?

    1. Take a piece of paper.
    2. Mark an X in a big box CLEARLY beside the candidate you want.
    3. Put it in the ballot box.

    Can it really be that simple? Yes!

    As a software developer, I have to ask:

    WHY IS ANYONE IN THEIR RIGHT MINDS USING A BLOODY COMPUTER TO DO THIS? I don't care if it's open source or closed source software on it, running on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, whatever. All of these are harder to verify (if not impossible) that no tampering was done than SIMPLE PIECES OF PAPER.

    Here, I'll link to Cringely, that way you'll know it's true ;-) http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20031211. html

  4. Re:(sigh) by Richard+Steiner · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why are they using computers?

    Because somebody, somewhere is getting a cut of the contract costs...

    --
    Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
    The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
  5. Not All User Error (RTFA) by raehl · · Score: 5, Informative

    The article does focus on the machines not working because the cards you need to run them were not brought to the location. That's definitely user error - you wouldn't say paper balloting was broken if you forgot to bring the ballots.

    But, towards the end of the article, there is this:

    Louise Bradley said she arrived at her polling station after the electronic cards had been delivered, but her card did not work properly. When she got to the section of the ballot listing candidates for the Democratic central committee, it was already filled out. Bradley said she had to remove the computer's choices and insert her own.

    Now *THAT* is a problem with electronic voting, and a severe one.

    --
    paintball
  6. The answer is simple. by plopez · · Score: 5, Funny


    Just eliminate voting. It is apparent that voting is a bad idea that *just doesn't work*. I mean the free market can and *should* be allowed to solve all of our governance problems and so we should just auction off our federal, local and state governments to the highest bidders; who will eliminate taxes and replace them with 'users fees'. Though corporate users will get breaks and 'bulk discounts' since they are so important for the economy and preserving freedom.

    Really, anything else is just creeping socialism.

    --
    putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
  7. Re:(sigh) by AgNO3 · · Score: 5, Funny

    I thought you had to be dead to vote in Chicago.

    --
    OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink :-(
  8. Re:(sigh) by pdschmid · · Score: 5, Informative

    I just don't buy that argument. In Germany, all voting is also paper-based only and everything is counted by hand. Polls close at 6 pm and we generally have firm results the latest around 10 pm. The morning newspapers the next day have the preliminary official result on the front pages. The final official result is only available several weeks later, but that is the same in the US (election results are officially certified by each state's Secretary of State in the weeks after election day). The process in which votes are counted in Germany scales perfectly well (each precinct counts its own ballots, then reports the results to the county from where it goes to the state level and then finally to the federal level): Elections didn't suddenly take longer to count after we added 16 million citizens through the reunification.
    Just to add some data: In the 2004 US presidential elections, 122,293,548 valid votes were cast. In the 2005 federal elections in Germany, 48,044,841 valid votes were cast. Germany has 16 states.