Voting Machine Problems In (Where Else?) Florida
from the but,-of-course... dept
While there have been sporadic reports here and there of electronic voting problems, the bigger problems are now coming out. Apparently, down in Florida, someone forgot to plug the machines in properly (brilliant!), and the batteries ran out, leading to 37 votes going "missing". The details are a bit sketchy at this point, but the idea that a machine might run out of power seems like an obvious possibility to prepare for, and it's stunning (though, unfortunately, not surprising) that these machines appear to have been unable to deal with that.
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Sounds like someone on Florida is fixing elections. Lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place.
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Yeah
What are the odds you suppose that this happened in a economically depressed area that was likely to vote for the DMC?
Seriously though human errors do happen, this is right up there with bags of paper ballots going "missing" or bursting into flame or whatever.
Ultimately if done right electronic voting should be the better data collection tool. Yes we need a paper trail, but come on they ran for how many hours not being plugged in? That is actually sort of impressive that they had that level of redundancy... But stil how could votes be lost? Off/on/standby/suspend etc, should have no middle ground either the machine can collect data or not.
I still don’t understand why Florida is allowed to vote on anything national at all clearly they have demonstrated that their process has been horrible corrupted at this point.
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Maybe it's the techie's fault
Maybe it's because some techie gave a self-righteous, thundering speech about the high-techness of the machines, that the ignorant masses couldn't possibly understand it. So of course, nobody was told that the things had to be plugged in.
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Re: Maybe it's the techie's fault
Erm.....most UPS systems don't run for much more than 20 minutes, depending on how much power a machine needs. I could only guess at how much power these touch screens needed, but hearing that they worked on battery power for a while but not the whole time sounds about right. You can really only supply something with so much battery power before it becomes dangerous as hell.
And cut Florida some slack. They're bad paper-hole punchers, so its fitting that they suck at plugging stuff in too.......
But seriously, I can't believe this is the only voting flaw in the country. I'm betting someone else did something similar with an e-voting machine in another state.
And finally, these things LOOK like self-containing units to the layman, so why should he think otherwise?
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