To paraphrase someone who has been mentioned a little bit this week, "Here we go again..." The AP:
- TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Touchscreen voting machines in 11 counties have a software flaw that could make manual recounts impossible in November's presidential election, state officials said.
A spokeswoman for the secretary of state called the problems "minor technical hiccups" that can be resolved, but critics allege voting officials wrongly certified a voting system they knew had a bug.
Yes...but a quiet hiccup is only a step away from a noisy belch.
The problem is that you have conflicting, almost irreconcilable, world views -- mirror image perceptions of insidious motives. Neither side accepts what the other claims. You can hear the tick-tick-tick as a controversy timebomb begins to count down to The Big Moment. More:
- The electronic voting machines are a response to Florida's 2000 presidential election fiasco, where thousands of punchcard ballots were improperly marked. But the new machines have brought concerns that errors could go unchecked without paper records of the electronic voting.
The machines, made by Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb., fail to provide a consistent electronic "event log" of voting activity when asked to reproduce what happened during the election, state officials said.
Officials with the company and the state Division of Elections said they believe they can fix the problem by linking the voting equipment with laptop computers. Florida's two largest counties — Miami-Dade and Broward — are among those affected by the flaws.
It's going to have to be a truly solid, convincing solution. It could even help the Democrats if they use it as a rallying call to get their voters out to vote. You can see the seeds slowly blossom now:
- Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., has asked state Attorney General Charlie Crist to investigate whether the head of the state elections division lied under oath when he denied knowing of the computer problem before reading about it in the media. A spokeswoman for Crist said he was reviewing the request.
The elections chief, Ed Kast, abruptly resigned Monday, saying he wanted a change of pace.
Yes. Just like CIA Director George Tenet resigned to spend more time with his family. But we're not through yet:
- During a May 17 deposition for a lawsuit Wexler filed seeking to require a paper trail for state voting machines, Kast said he had recently heard of the problem only days earlier. But in a letter to Crist, Wexler said the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, a citizens' group, notified Kast and Secretary of State Glenda Hood of the glitch in March.
Hood blamed Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections Constance Kaplan for the delay, telling Kaplan in a May 13 letter she should have notified state officials when she learned of the problem in June 2003.
Nonetheless, state and county election officials insist the problem can be resolved in the five months before the November election.
"These are minor technical hiccups that happen," said Hood spokeswoman Nicole DeLara. "No votes are lost, or could be lost."
Wexler and coalition members said they want to know how the state can be sure that glitches will not prevent elections officials from even detecting computer malfunctions.
"How do you know that any votes were lost if your audit is wrong?" asked Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, chairwoman of the Miami-Dade coalition.
State officials say there is no need for recounts, or an audit trail, with the touchscreen system because it was designed to prevent people from voting in the same race more than once — an overvote — and provide multiple alerts to voters to warn them when they are skipping a race — an undervote.
They emphasize that the "glitch" in the touchscreen machines occurs when the audit is done after the election, not when the tally sheet is printed in each precinct when polls close.
So it seems that even before it has formally debuted Florida's new, improved voting system is as controversial as ever.
QUESTION: Should the Supreme Court set aside the date to handle the 2004 Florida election results now, or wait awhile?
Even better. A state official in charge of buying voting machines worked for the company they were bought from.
No I am not going to dig up the link. I'm a drunken blogger not an investigative one.
But I think your very close already with the information you have posted. You won't have far to dig.
I think they should go ahead and book the court date now. Why wait til after the election? They should know it's coming. ;]
Could somebody tell me WTH is wrong with just using a "fill in the dot with a black marker then insert into reader" system?
Still too complicated for the brain dead moron voter segment?
Actually, yeah, there are huge problems with the old "mark the box with a pen" method.
They suffer from the same exact problems as the punch cards, only worse. People will mark outside the boxes. They'll make marks which aren't clear. They'll leave smudges which confuse things. They'll mark more than one box, and so on. And the technology for counting them is far less reliable than the punch cards.
It is not possible to design a system which some voters will not screw up. This is why the system has to be designed with rules: you explain how things work, you urge people to double-check their ballots--and then if the ballot it screwed up, it's the voter's fault for not following instructions.
This is why, by the way, the whole business of counting dimpled chads and partially-punched holes and all that crap was always illegal and was wrong from the beginning. Mind you, even in the unofficial recounts where they did count those, Bush still won, which should have some people shutting up. But people who don't care about the facts are legion.
I personally think the entire nation should use the punch card ballots. They're simple, clear, easy to double check, and leave a paper trail that can be checked for recounts. It's superior to any other system. I'm very against the electronic voting, although I consider that a lost cause.
Perhaps the Florida electronic voting machines could use punch-cards as a paper trail.
Paper punch ballots degrade. Handling them during a recount can cause more chads to fall out than was intended.
The "fill in the circle with the black marker" is a great system. It was printed on white cardstock and easy to read. We fed it into the scanner on the way out the door and it rejected it at once if there were any problems reading it, so the voter could try again. It would be easy to recount by hand, and won't degrade like punch ballots.
My wee wifey was a judge of elections for 20 years in the home town of Al Gore's campaign manager, where the punch cards were used. In all that time she never encountered a spoiled ballot, which is what a hanging or dimpled chad, or two punches for one position, would have been. It took a lot more than handling to cause a chad to fall out, but the punching procedure was sure and positive. I was mystified with the problems they had in Florida until I heard the allegation that people were trying to punch two ballots at once, which makes sense to me.
The elections chief, Ed Kast, abruptly resigned Monday, saying he wanted a change of pace.
Meaning, he saw another pointless uproar coming and decided to find a job less thankless -- like directing the White House's "New Tone" office.
This whole voting business is _so_ insane. The electronic companies claim that a ‘perfect’ voting machine has no paper. Yet, the very act of removing the paper sends verifiability and reproducibility down the tubes!
Here in Seattle, we have SAT-like ballots with a computerized scanner. If will immediately reject ‘bad’ ballots.
Yes, people screw-up -> but they get immediate feedback. Red lights and a tone is enough for anyone... unless the 'proctors' are actively interfering.
IMNSHO this is pretty good. ‘Best’ would perhaps be a ‘touch screen’ that itself generates a paper ballot for your review. None of the names for the non-chosen candidates need even appear on this ballot - just a list of who you’ve chosen. Then that piece of paper is sent into the actual voting machine.
If someone demands a hand recount - all of the original ballots are on hand.
If someone votes for an odd combination of people, it is clearly spelled out - you can vote for Senator and yet choose not to vote for President without having your ballot rejected or ‘interpreted’.
A ‘ballot’ that is going to giving the scanner problems is rejected immediately - and can be reprinted! The ‘touch-screen’ isn’t a voting machine. It is a ‘ballot preparation aid’.
There is no 'receipt' other than the actual (sequestered) ballot. You can't 'sell' your vote and prove you voted one way or another - the proof is with the election commission.