Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Overheated Voting Machine Cast Its Own Votes

Posted by samzenpus on from the getting-the-machine-vote dept.

longacre writes in with the results of a report on voting machines that malfunctioned in NY during the 2010 mid-term elections. "Tests of a number of electronic voting machines that recorded shockingly high numbers of extra votes in the 2010 election show that overheating may have caused upwards of 30 percent of votes in some South Bronx voting precincts to go uncounted. WNYC first reported on the issue in December 2011, when it was found that tens of thousands of votes in the 2010 elections went uncounted because electronic voting machines counted more than one vote in a race. A review by the state Board of Election and the electronic voting machines’ manufacturer ES&S found that these 'over votes,' as they’re called, were due to a machine error. In the report issued by ES&S, when the machine used in the South Bronx overheated, ballots run during a test began coming back with errors."

5 of 378 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Scrap them all by yakatz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Except when slot machines are hacked, the developers usually keep it a secret so the casinos will not be investigated. (Mitnick, K (2005). The Art of Intrusion.)

    Oh wait, the voting machine companies probably try to do that too.

  2. One More Thing: by SlippyToad · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Move Voting Day to Saturday. The only reason it was on Tuesday was to allow for travel time and to avoid the often-strictly observed Sabbath of the still quite Puritan colonial USA. Make it a Saturday, and make all businesses except essential service and emergency personnel close on that day period, so the people can take their time to vote.

    There. That's the last one.

    --
    One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
  3. Re:Scrap them all by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ATMs are incredibly reliable these days. The fact that these POS voting machines are built, in large part, by the same people who build ATMs indicates strongly that Occam's Razor beats Hanlon's (or Napoleon's) Razor here; malice, rather than stupidity or incompetence, is the simplest and most likely explanation.

    --
    The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
  4. It was voting fraud by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It shows a cluster of voids in MULTIPLE voting cells in one area. That means

    1) it was not random.
    2) Multiple machines in multiple buildings all voided?? No, not overheating, you might pretend that this particular part of NY is hot,but different building have different heat characteristics.

    That map is a clear voting fraud pattern, it suggests local tampering.

  5. Get the Choicepoint data by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Added comment: Get the Choicepoint data, I bet it shows that section of New York votes strongly Democrat or strongly Republican, and it means that someone was trying to change the election by removing that cluster of votes.

    Then go subpoena Choicepoint to find out who commissioned political affiliation data for those districts, and start prosecuting these voter frauds.