Electronic Voting Machine Shown To Mis-Record Votes

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the scary dept

One of the silly arguments of those defening poorly designed electronic voting machines is that there’s never been any evidence that they miscount votes. Well, there goes that argument. Found over at Freedom to Tinker is news of some research done on electronic voting machines used in Florida elections that clearly show the machine’s voting image and the audit logs do not match, which could lead to votes being lost or not counted properly. What’s scary about this is that the report noting these problems was written a year ago and, even those these problems were known, the machines were still used and the same problems occurred again. As always, the local election supervisor claims that, even though they know about this problem, it’s no big deal. She claims that the only problem is with the audit system – and not the vote tabulation. Of course, if the audit system doesn’t match the vote tabulation there’s no way to know that the vote tabulation actually works properly. Even worse, the “workaround” the supervisor came up with was basically to use uncertified software. What’s wrong with a paper trail again?