| Friday, February 24, 2006 |
| Rise of the machines |
Electronic voting machines are back in the headlines ... and the headlines ain't good. Via Bradblog:
AP -- yes, AP -- is now reporting the just released audit information obtained from Palm Beach County, Florida's 2004 Election. And the picture of the Sequoia paperless touch-screen voting machines used that night is not pretty. The information was obtained and released tonight by BlackBoxVoting.org...From the AP story... BlackBoxVoting.org, which describes itself as a nonpartisan, nonprofit citizens group, said it found 70,000 instances in Palm Beach County of cards getting stuck in the paperless ATM-like machines and that the computers logged about 100,000 errors, including memory failures.Also, the hard drives crashed on some of the machines made by Oakland, Calif.-based Sequoia Voting Systems, some machines apparently had to be rebooted over and over, and 1,475 re-calibrations were performed on Election Day on more than 4,300 units, Harris said. Re-calibrations are done when a machine is malfunctioning, she said."I actually think there's enough votes in play in Florida that it's anybody's guess who actually won the presidential race," [BBV's Bev] Harris added.
This is not an unserious story, in that it raises fresh questions not only about the outcome of the 2004 election, which hinged on Ohio and Florida (either one could have delivered the presidential race to John Kerry), but also about the soundness of electronic voting machines themselves.
I have been reluctant -- very reluctant -- to get on the "machines were fixed" bandwagon regarding the 2004 election, even though I think 2000 was a clear case of outright election theft by the GOP. I was assured by a Broward County election official last year that the electronic voting machines used in my county couldn't be fixed en masse, although subsequent investigations, including by BBV, have called that into question.
But the bottom line is, if the machines are subject to error, or worse, to fraud, then using them imperils the most fundamental aspect of our democracy (such as it is under the current regime).
This should be looked into...
Tags: politics, News, elections, electronic voting, election theft, 2004, Republicans, Diebold, Sequoia |
posted by JReid @ 3:27 PM   |
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