From the New York Times comes
an article by Ian Urbina talking about how the horror show that is Diebold and electronic voting is finally sinking in to the minds of local and state election boards.
More below plus snippets from the article...
Less than two months before voters head to the polls, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. of Maryland this week became the most recent official to raise concerns publicly. Mr. Ehrlich, a Republican, said he lacked confidence in the state's new $106 million electronic voting system and suggested a return to paper ballots.
If even ole Bob lacks confidence in these things, you know they're truly messed up. He is, after all, the man who fought early voting tooth and nail. Then again, maybe he thinks that certain precincts running out of ballots or not receiving them on time is less likely to get press than broken voting machines or machines that fail to produce a paper trail of any kind.
This year, about one-third of all precincts nationwide are using the electronic voting technology for the first time, raising the chance of problems at the polls as workers struggle to adjust to the new system.
Doesn't that just give us all a warm and fuzzy glow? I know it gives me one. Or maybe it's a burning and frazzled glare. Yeah, I think that's more correct.
"We have the real chance of recounts in the coming elections, and if you have differences between the paper trail and the electronic record, which number prevails?" said Richard L. Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and the author of the Election Law blog, www.electionlawblog.org.
Professor Hasen found that election challenges filed in court grew to 361 in 2004, up from 197 in 2000. "What you have coming up is the intersection of new technology and an unclear legal regime," he said.
Great question. And its one without any proper legal answer. A machine that merely tallies up a total and doesn't print one out for you is truly, truly unreliable. You have no idea of the intention of the voter because you don't have any thing that the voter personally looked at and verified that is unable to be easily changed. What, are you going to call up voters, ask them all to come in again and do paper ballots and check those results against the machine's results? You might have to. What a disgrace. On the bright side:
In January, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico decided to reverse plans to use the touch-screen machines, opting instead to return to paper ballots with optical scanners. Last month, the Connecticut secretary of state, Susan Bysiewicz, decided to do the same.
Some people really are getting the message that voters don't trust these things. The question is, can we get a refund on them? I know I'd sue if I were a state official who spent a pile of money on these machines only to find out that they are horribly flawed (e.g. the Princeton demonstration) and that therefore the citizens of my state don't trust them.
I'm glad we're finally seeing some real government response to the concerns of ordinary people over these things. Read the rest of the article. It's quite good. One last snippet I'll leave you with:
But even the systems backed up by paper have problems. In a study released this month, the nonpartisan Election Science Institute found that about 10 percent of the paper ballots sampled from the May primary in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, were uncountable because printers had jammed and poll workers had loaded the paper in backward.
Thanks for reading.
(Note: 'free speech zone' did a diary on this yesterday but it was only about a report from a different source that the Times would be running this thing today. This is about the article that the Times has in fact run, hence I think it qualifies as different or new and updated enough to merit a new diary. I'll delete it if enough of you disagree though.)