Who Needs Hanging Chads When You Have Computers?
It appears that hanging bites will be the issue in the Florida election this year.
[Susan] Bucher [Palm Beach Supervisor of Elections] said Palm Beach’s optical scan election system had – unbeknownst to anyone-mixed up the race results. As a result, the wrong winners and losers were called.
And Bucher says the very same thing could happen in the presidential election.
“You know the first thing that they tell you is you’re going to scare the voters,” Bucher said. “Well you know what… we’re scared too.”
Me, too.
Thanks to Fenway Fran for the heads up.
The good thing about these is that you can detect it after the fact. With the touch-screen systems all you get is the in-memory result which can’t be verified.
1Jesse Griffin (Immoral Minority blog) has some truly scary news about voting machines. The ones that will count a lot of our votes are owned by a company that is closely tied to Mitt Romney. The fox is already committing carnage in the hen house.
2Not what I needed to hear. The Bride and I just mailed in our ballots in Florida. Florida is just as weird as my beloved Texas, but on steroids.
Is it a coincidence or a law that the Repubs are first on the ballot? Every contest is: REP
DEM
Maybe I’ve just seen too many Republican shenanigans in elections. Does anyone recall Floriduh in 2000?
3The Diebold electronic machines all have little printers in them — the kind you find at every point-of-sale credit card machine in the country. Diebold could easily program the machine to print out two copies of how you voted. You could sign the white copy and give it to the election judge and keep the yellow copy for your records (or give it to the exit pollster). That way, there would be a paper trail instead of just an electronic total. Diebold is a good Republican company that tells us we just have to trust them to be honest. Right.
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