cananian

Incidentally, all but two counties in the Iowa caucuses used direct-recording electronic vote machines. This means, that if the results in Iowa were surprising to you, there are no ballots in existence to double-check, and you're not allowed to examine the machines directly. This puts an enormous amount of power in the hands of the voting machine manufacturers, since a swing of less than 10 percent in the caucus results has been sufficient to transform Dean into "former front-runner". The daily poll results in New Hampshire have been most enlightening, as Dean's lead there has vanished overnight as Kerry's upset became the front-page news story nationwide. [It shouldn't be surprising that the press has a strong influence on voters, but as Americans we still pretend that we make voting choices based on fundamentals, not merely the fact that some guy did well in some other state.]

Fairfax County (whose voting problems I wrote about twice previously) seems to be taking their problems seriously:

"We've just done an electronic Florida. That's what it looks like to me at first blush," said Sen. Ken Cuccinelli (R-Fairfax), referring to the balloting problems in the 2000 presidential election. He added that he was "shocked" when he heard that Thompson lost and blamed the machines for taking votes from her.

"I don't think this is going to be a partisan issue. Anyone who is running as a candidate is concerned about the integrity of the process," he said.

Further,

Thompson has asked that electoral board staff members test every machine to determine the extent of such problems, and she said she is considering filing a lawsuit to force them to do so.

...but note that the pernicious thing about DRE voting machines is that you can't reconstruct the "correct" tally even if problems were found. The only recourse would be to hold the entire election all over again. And the "testing" methods traditionally used for DRE machines don't exactly inspire confidence in their thoroughness --- although in this case even the "punch some buttons and see if things seem to work" testing method was sufficient to disclose severe deficiencies.

Ed Felton sums it up best:

And how do we know the cause was a bug, rather than fraud? Because the error was visible to voters. If this had been fraud, the "X" on the screen would never have disappeared -- but the vote would have been given, silently, to the wrong candidate.

You could hardly construct a better textbook illustration of the importance of having a voter-verifiable paper trail. The paper trail would have helped voters notice the disappearance of their votes, and it would have provided a reliable record to consult in a later recount. As it is, we'll never know who really won the election.

(in other news, Boulder County, CO also seems to have had some election troubles this Nov 4th. They seem to be doing a responsible job of auditing their results, until the very end of the article, where they say, "Many election systems vendors are telling us that minor software changes are pretty much routine and don't need certification.")

From Boone County, Indiana:

Lebanon -- Boone County officials are searching for an answer to the computer glitch that spewed out impossible numbers and interrupted an otherwise uneventful election process Tuesday.

"I about had a heart attack," County Clerk Lisa Garofolo said of the breakdown that came as an eager crowd watched computer-generated vote totals being projected onto a wall of the County Courthouse rotunda.

"I'm assuming the glitch was in the software."

A lengthy collaboration between the county's information technology director and advisers from the MicroVote software producer fixed the problem. But before that, computer readings of stored voting machine data showed far more votes than registered voters.

"It was like 144,000 votes cast," said Garofolo, whose corrected accounting showed just 5,352 ballots from a pool of fewer than 19,000 registered voters.

"Believe me, there was nobody more shook up than I was."

Source: The Indianapolis Star. [Thanks to Dan Margolis for the pointer.]

Note that MicroVote calls themselves, "The leader in Direct Recording Electronic Voting Technology". (Google also reveals that the hidden page description meta-information on this page calls MicroVote, "the most reliable DRE voting system". Heaven help us!) The states and counties using MicroVote machines are disclosed here and here: Arkansas, Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, and Tennessee. They make both Voting Hardware and Election Management Software; no indication from the Star story which was at fault. If we're lucky it's the Election Management Software, because remember the first principle of these Direct Recording Electronic Voting machines is: THERE IS NO BACKUP! Nothing you can go to for a recount. So it's hard to imagine how they could resurrect any sort of credible vote tabulation (read, declare a winner) if the MACHINES were at fault.