Slashdot Mirror
Man's Vote for Himself Missing In E-Vote Count
Catbeller writes "The AP is reporting that Randy Wooten, mayoral candidate for Waldenburg Arkansas (a town of eighty people) discovered that the electronic voting system hadn't registered the one vote he knew had been cast for him ... because he cast it himself. The Machine gave him zero votes. That would be an error rate of 3%, counting the actual votes cast — 18 and 18 for a total of 36." From the article: "Poinsett County Election Commissioner Junaway Payne said the issue had been discussed but no action taken yet. 'It's our understanding from talking with the secretary of state's office that a court order would have to be obtained in order to open the machine and check the totals,' Payne said. 'The votes were cast on an electronic voting machine, but paper ballots were available.'"
It's a trade secret, you can't look inside the voting machines.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Until there is a viable independantly managed standard, it's impossible for citizens to truly trust the outcome of elections. Given that fellow citizens have died to save our democracy, anything less that the utmost trust in our voting system is to show fallen the utmost disrespect.
Other countries have very strict voting rules. If the shennanigans on the HBO special were to have happened in any other true democracy, they would have been rounded up in election fraud arrests the next day. It's that serious.
If the errors are random then it doesn't matter how many votes there are, the expected error is the same. Statistical variance affects the actual error.