7/28/2004
Touch-screen votes disappear
How accurate were Florida's touch-screen voting machines in 2002? Nobody knows because the Miami-Dade County ballot data has been erased.
In a world where cash registers, Lotto machines and even subways ticket machines gives you a slip a paper, people have a hard time understanding why a voting machine can't do the same thing. Everyday life tells you this just isn't a big technological challenge.
Now it seems that data kept on "flash cards" were wiped out in May 2003 -- or was it November? Why was this information saved only on a server? Why wasn't there any kind of backup? Hard to say.
Eschaton sees a patttern: Hey, Florida - ever hear of backing your data up on CD? Coupled with Jeb's new law prohibiting manual recounts of electronic votes and his continued attempts to disenfranchise non-Hispanic felons and - well, I think you can see where this is going.
Meanwhile the St. Pete Times tries to assure us that nobody has presented any real reason to believe that with touch-screen voting anything can go wrong ... go wrong ... wrong. Columnist Troxler goes further, ridiculing worriworts, luddites and conspiracy kooks who fail to appreciate touch-screen perfection.
He even makes an uncharacterstic misstatement of fact -- Skeptics insist: "There ought to be a physical copy of my individual vote somewhere." Yet millions of Americans have done without it for decades, satisfied to pull a little mechanical lever in a voting booth.
I've seen the readout from mechanical machines. (Damn, does that make me feel old.) They produced a huge paper roll with carbon-copy printout. This would be removed from the machine at the polling place in front of poll watchers. It would then be sent to the supervisor of elections where it could be produced if needed in a recount.
Tech guru Dan Gilmore says:
This is even worse than it seems.
The notion of an audit trail in this case is ludicrous to begin with. Even with a digital backup there's still no way you can trust that the votes cast were the votes recorded.
That's the big problem with touch-screen voting machines that lack a voter-verifiable paper trail -- paper that can be used to check the machines' accuracy and be the actual ballot in a recount.
In a world where cash registers, Lotto machines and even subways ticket machines gives you a slip a paper, people have a hard time understanding why a voting machine can't do the same thing. Everyday life tells you this just isn't a big technological challenge.
Now it seems that data kept on "flash cards" were wiped out in May 2003 -- or was it November? Why was this information saved only on a server? Why wasn't there any kind of backup? Hard to say.
Eschaton sees a patttern: Hey, Florida - ever hear of backing your data up on CD? Coupled with Jeb's new law prohibiting manual recounts of electronic votes and his continued attempts to disenfranchise non-Hispanic felons and - well, I think you can see where this is going.
Meanwhile the St. Pete Times tries to assure us that nobody has presented any real reason to believe that with touch-screen voting anything can go wrong ... go wrong ... wrong. Columnist Troxler goes further, ridiculing worriworts, luddites and conspiracy kooks who fail to appreciate touch-screen perfection.
He even makes an uncharacterstic misstatement of fact -- Skeptics insist: "There ought to be a physical copy of my individual vote somewhere." Yet millions of Americans have done without it for decades, satisfied to pull a little mechanical lever in a voting booth.
I've seen the readout from mechanical machines. (Damn, does that make me feel old.) They produced a huge paper roll with carbon-copy printout. This would be removed from the machine at the polling place in front of poll watchers. It would then be sent to the supervisor of elections where it could be produced if needed in a recount.
Tech guru Dan Gilmore says:
This is even worse than it seems.
The notion of an audit trail in this case is ludicrous to begin with. Even with a digital backup there's still no way you can trust that the votes cast were the votes recorded.
That's the big problem with touch-screen voting machines that lack a voter-verifiable paper trail -- paper that can be used to check the machines' accuracy and be the actual ballot in a recount.
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