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Another Election, Another Slew of Voting Machine Glitches

Posted by Soulskill on from the another-vote-for-robot-nixon dept.

An anonymous reader writes: As Election Day in the U.S. starts to wind down, reports from around the country highlight another round of technological failures at the polls. In Virginia, the machines are casting votes for the wrong candidates. In North Carolina, polling sites received the wrong set of thumb drives, delaying voters for hours. In Michigan, software glitches turned voters away in the early morning, including a city mayor. A county in Indiana saw five of its polling sites spend hours trying to get the machines to boot correctly. And in Connecticut, an as-yet-unspecified computer glitch caused a judge to keep the polls open for extra time. When are we going to get this right?

6 of 388 comments (clear)

  1. Marked Paper Ballots FTW by Irate+Engineer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We'll "get it right" when we knock off the electronic BS and use what has been tested to work, marked paper ballots. It.Just.Works.

    --

    Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!

    Vote for Bernie in 2016!

    1. Re:Marked Paper Ballots FTW by Z80a · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The eletronic machines would not have it if they used actual physical buttons.
      They would not have this issue if the program was on a ROM chip.
      Not a problem if the voting machines had a internal encrypted flash memory.
      No glitch if used the two first on this list
      And that could be solved by software as well.

      But for some reason diebold think that they should do all this stupid flashy show instead of actually designing something actually reliable and safe.

    2. Re:Marked Paper Ballots FTW by riverat1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Unlike the bits in computer memory optical scan ballots can be recounted by hand if necessary. The error rate may not be zero but for most elections it's low enough to be below the threshold that would change an election.

    3. Re: Marked Paper Ballots FTW by kenwd0elq · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yeah, I guess having electronic voting machines AND working printers is an invitation to failure, especially when a few dozen Sharpie pens is ... what, fifty bucks?

      I realize this is heresy, but even though I've been working with PCs on a daily basis for THIRTY YEARS, not everything needs to be computerized.

  2. Get rid of the electronic voting machines. by riverat1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Electronic voting machines are a solution looking for a problem. Good old paper ballots work just fine for elections and are easily recounted if necessary.

  3. We'll Get This Right... by linuxrocks123 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    when we stop using computers to count votes.

    --
    vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.