|
Why Machines Are Bad at Counting Votes |
|
|
|
|
By Wendy M Grossman, The Guardian
|
|
May 03, 2009 |
Democracy is made difficult by the fact that electronic voting systems are inherently flawed - and susceptible to fraud
This article appeared in the UK Guardian on April 30, 2009.
It's commonly said that insanity is doing the same thing over and
over again while expecting different results. Yet this is what we keep
doing with electronic voting machines - find flaws and try again. It
should therefore have been no surprise when, at the end of March,
California's secretary of state's office of voting system technology
assessment decertified older voting systems from Diebold's Premier
Election Solutions division. The reason: a security flaw that erased
197 votes in the Humboldt county precinct in last November's
presidential election.
Clearly, 197 votes would not have changed
the national result. But the loss, which exceeds the error rate allowed
under the Help America Vote Act of 2002, was only spotted because a
local citizen group, the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project monitored the vote using a ballot-imaging scanner to create
an independent record. How many votes were lost elsewhere?
Humboldt
county used Diebold's GEMS operating system version 1.18.19 to tally
postal ballots scanned in batches, or "decks". The omission of votes
was a result of a flaw in the system, where, given particular
circumstances, it deletes the first deck, named "Deck Zero", without
noting it in the system's audit logs.
Read the entire article at Guardian.uk.
Comment on This Article
You must login to leave comments...
Other Visitors Comments
There are no comments currently....
|
