The Carteret County voting failure has
brought a lot of hand-wringing to elections officials and
"I-told-you-sos” from activists who sounded the alarm about electronic
balloting months ago.A touch-screen voting network there failed
to record more than 4,400 votes cast before Election Day because its
data storage was full — the result of outdated software and poor
communication between the California company that made the machine and
county officials.Election workers said they didn’t see
warning lights as the voting tabulator continued to "record” ballots
that were never counted.
"I
can’t believe that anyone would design a machine so badly that votes
could be lost this way,” said David Dill, a Stanford University
computer science professor and founder of the watchdog group Verified
Voting.
Um, yeah. Anyone think of testing it first, or maybe reading the manual? Silly me, that would be stupid. And now we are back to the possibility of a full state recount, with a price tag of $3+ million. Great.
As a special legislative committee is
hastily assembled to look at potential solutions, the members will have
to ask whether the problem should require drastic changes to state
election law, more fine-tuning to reduce human errors, or just more
money."There’s always been problems because no system is
perfect,” said Sen. Austin Allran, R-Catawba, a co-chairman of the
upcoming legislative panel. "If you had a (paper) ballot box, you could
have counting problems or intentional fraud.
Bingo. There has always been fraud, and, while tech systems will present their own special problems, we need to take the human element out as much as possible (except for the actual voters, of course). Tired poll workers, as well as removing the ability for people to cheat or just mess up. Are you comfortable performing on line banking, purchasing something on line, etc? I am. Why not put in several layers of recognition protocols, as well as a high grade firewall to the server. We would also be taking much of the exit poll bullshit away, as people could vote from home, and have the added benefit of higher turnouts.
