NYT Notes Flaws In Current Electronic Voting Methods

dstates writes "The New York time has an informative article on electronic voting with some frightening statistics and interesting anecdotes. Printers on Diebold machines in Cayahoga County OH jammed 20% of the time, making paper trail recounts suspect. Crashing voting machines in California reportedly resulted from Windows CE sensing fingers sliding from one key to another as a drag and drop event, and the Diebold software failing to handle the event. Of course, rather than just ignore this unanticipated condition, the OS did the right thing for a voting machine and crashed."

Absentee Vote!

[rthille]

In California, you can be an Permanent Absentee Voter, which guarantees a paper trail for your vote. I deliver mine directly to the County Registrar of Voters, but I believe you can drop them off an any polling place, or mail them, though they have to arrive by the deadline, postmark does not count.

Re:Software standards are just terrible, complicat

[Z00L00K]

Berkeley has produced a document that's even more specifically addressing the voting machine verification [berkeley.edu].

NYT Flaws in Current Reporting Methods

[Nexus7]

Well, congratulations the to NYT for the extremely timely reporting, more than a year after the elections they're talking about, and more than 3 years after the election when the HAVA voting machines were first used. Also, years after articles in magazines such as Harpers and many progressive sites, not to mention news report the day after the elections about voting machines failures, and statistical anomalies in the declared election results vs exit polls, not to mention anomalies such as number of undervotes bigger than the total number of voters in some precincts.

And as for the machines themselves, you have to try to make machines and voting systems as pathetic as these. Pure incompetence alone cannot account for this.