Electronic Voting is still not ready for prime time…

InfoWorld: Top News is reporting Florida e-voting: 18,000 'missing' votes in close race.

“Government watchdog group Common Cause has called for an investigation of electronic voting machines used in Florida's 13th congressional district because of 18,000 missing votes…. About 18,000 people who cast votes in other races in Tuesday's election failed to record a vote for either candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives. At last count, Republican candidate Vern Buchanan led Democratic candidate Christine Jennings by less than 400 votes in the race to succeed Republican Katherine Harris, who ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate.”

… But her spirit lives on.

“This is part of the reason we've been calling for a paper trail,” Wilcox said… Ironically, Sarasota County voters on Tuesday approved a ballot measure requiring paper trail ballots to be used as a backup to the e-voting machines.”

Whether by programmer error (certainly possible), operator error (easy enough), configuration problem, or tin-foil-hat-conspiracy, electronic voting is not an improvement on paper ballots. Unless and until we can make a system than makes voting more accurate, we ought to just wait until the paper ballots get counted.

Powered by WordPress. Designed by Woo Themes

This work by Ted Roche is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.