New Jersey E-Voting Problems Worse Than Originally Suspected

TechDirt is reporting that the New Jersey e-voting troubles are even worse than originally thought. Apparently the "minor bug" which was supposed to be fixed is still not corrected, suggesting that Sequoia still doesn't know what is going on. "Ed Felten has received a bunch of 'summary tapes' from the last election in New Jersey, and while many of them do have the vote totals matching up correctly at the end at least two of the summary tapes simply don't add up, meaning that Sequoia's explanation of what went wrong is incorrect. Given how often the company has denied or hidden errors in its machines, despite a ton of evidence, we shouldn't be surprised that it was inaccurate in explaining away this latest problem as well. However, we should be outraged that the company refuses to allow third party researchers to investigate these machines. It's a travesty that any government would use them when they've been shown to have so many problems and the company is unwilling to allow an independent investigation."

Comments

Here's the link that should have been in summary

[langelgjm]

Here's the link that should have been in the summary, to the post in Ed Felten's blog, Freedom to Tinker, complete with images of the paper tape in question.

Re:I'm a little surprised...

[number11]

that members of this site haven't started an open source project

You mean, like the Electronic Voting Machine Project and OpenSTV and the Voting Software Project and the Open Voting Consortium and Blue Screen Democracy and probably a dozen other projects?

One problem is that voting software/hardware has to be certified by the state. A ponderous, time-consuming, and expensive bureaucratic nightmare not particularly friendly to amateurs (or even corporations, unless there's a good prospect for vast sales).