[LINK] electronic voting machines story

[Jan Whitaker]

>
>Can You Count on Voting Machines?
>
>
>
>By CLIVE THOMPSON, The New York Times Magazine, January 6, 2008
>
>Jane Platten gestured, bleary-eyed, into the 
>secure room filled with voting machines. It was 
>3 a.m. on Nov. 7, and she had been working for 
>22 hours straight. "I guess we've seen how 
>technology can affect an election," she said. 
>The electronic voting machines in Cleveland were causing trouble again.
>
>For a while, it had looked as if things would go 
>smoothly for the Board of Elections office in 
>Cuyahoga County, Ohio. About 200,000 voters had 
>trooped out on the first Tuesday in November for 
>the lightly attended local elections, tapping 
>their choices onto the county's 5,729 
>touch-screen voting machines. The elections 
>staff had collected electronic copies of the 
>votes on memory cards and taken them to the main 
>office, where dozens of workers inside a secure, 
>glass-encased room fed them into the "GEMS 
>server," a gleaming silver Dell desktop computer that tallies the votes.
>
>Then at 10 p.m., the server suddenly froze up 
>and stopped counting votes. Cuyahoga County 
>technicians clustered around the computer, 
>debating what to do. A young, business-suited 
>employee from Diebold­the company that makes the 
>voting machines used in Cuyahoga­peered into the 
>screen and pecked at the keyboard. No one could 
>figure out what was wrong. So, like anyone faced 
>with a misbehaving computer, they simply turned 
>it off and on again. Voilà: It started 
>working­until an hour later, when it crashed a 
>second time. Again, they rebooted. By the wee 
>hours, the server mystery still hadn't been solved.
>
>Worse was yet to come. When the votes were 
>finally tallied the next day, 10 races were so 
>close that they needed to be recounted. But when 
>Platten went to retrieve paper copies of each 
>vote­generated by the Diebold machines as they 
>worked­she discovered that so many printers had 
>jammed that 20 percent of the machines involved 
>in the recounted races lacked paper copies of 
>some of the votes. They weren't lost, 
>technically speaking; Platten could hit "print" 
>and a machine would generate a replacement copy. 
>But she had no way of proving that these 
>replacements were, indeed, what the voters had 
>voted. She could only hope the machines had worked correctly.
>
>Click here to keep reading:
>
><http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06Vote-t.html>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06Vote-t.html
>Then sign our urgent petition for paper ballots 
>before the November election. Just click here to add your name:
>
><http://pol.moveon.org/paper2008/o.pl?id=11874-6195608-Bjsowx&t=5>http://pol.moveon.org/paper2008/o.pl?id=11874-6195608-Bjsowx&t=5
>
>Sources:
>1. "Can You Count on Voting Machines?," The New 
>York Times Magazine, January 6, 2008
><http://www.nytimes.com/magazine/>http://www.nytimes.com/magazine/
>
>2. "Rep. Holt To Offer New Election Reform 
>Proposal," National Journal Tech Daily, December 10, 2007
><http://www.moveon.org/r?r=3310&id=&id=11874-6195608-Bjsowx&t=6>http://www.moveon.org/r?r=3310&id=&id=11874-6195608-Bjsowx&t=6
>
>3. "Can You Count on Voting Machines?," The New 
>York Times Magazine, January 6, 2008
><http://www.nytimes.com/magazine/>http://www.nytimes.com/magazine/
>
>4. "Rep. Rush Holt to Push for Paper Ballots and 
>Vote Count Audits for 2008," AlterNet, December 27, 2007
><http://www.alternet.org/democracy/71608/>http://www.alternet.org/democracy/71608/

Jan Whitaker
JLWhitaker Associates, Melbourne Victoria
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com
personal: http://www.janwhitaker.com/personal/
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