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Voting Machine Problem Reports Already Rolling In
Several readers have submitted news of the inevitable problems involved with trying to securely collect information from tens of millions of people on the same day. A video is making the rounds of a touchscreen voting machine registering a vote for Mitt Romney when Barack Obama was selected. A North Carolina newspaper is reporting that votes for Romney are being switched to Obama. Voters are being encouraged to check and double-check that their votes are recorded accurately. In Ohio, some recently-installed election software got a pass from a District Court Judge. In Galveston County, Texas, poll workers didn't start their computer systems early enough to be ready for the opening of the polls, which led to a court order requiring the stations to be open for an extra two hours at night. Yesterday we discussed how people in New Jersey who were displaced by the storm would be allowed to vote via email; not only are some of the emails bouncing, but voters are being directed to request ballots from a county clerk's personal Hotmail account. If only vote machines were as secure as slot machines. Of course, there's still the good, old fashioned analog problems; workers tampering with ballots, voters being told they can vote tomorrow, and people leaving after excessively long wait times.
I voted with one of those machines today. It's not a touchscreen, you use a trackball to select the candidate. The guy is obviously trying to make it look like the machine doesn't work by touching the screen and not showing the trackball being moved.
Good thing there isn't anyone who needs to count 90 million ballots.
There are ~90 million ballots that are supposed to be counted. The fact that this gets divided up between thousands of different people doesn't change the fact that 90 million need to be counted.
by simple scanning machines.
This is part of making a properly designed electronic voting machine.
It isn't poor design, it's poor solutions to a problem that is well known and can already be dealt with. Every electronic voting system comes with inherrent problems, even the best designed ones. Those problems are often worse than the problems they're trying to solve.
Of course it is poor design. Every problem that we have with electronic voting machines is a direct result of poor design that could trivially be avoided. Miss calibrated screens. Trivial to solve. Hacked voting equipment. Trivial to solve. Lack of auditability. Trivial to solve. Hand counting has shown time and again to be terribly flawed. It has been used because it was the best we had at the time.
Well, we all wish you would limit yourself to that frequency...or less.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!