Voting Machines Are Awful
anybody else get the feeling that voting machines aren’t quite ready for actual use? The early voting in Florida is done on machines and the machines are revolting.
Broward Supervisor of Elections spokeswoman Mary Cooney said it’s not uncommon for screens on heavily used machines to slip out of sync, making votes register incorrectly.
Well, at least the mistakes cut both ways so it will average out. Oh wait, every instance they’ve found has skewed votes for the Republican candidate.
Mauricio Raponi wanted to vote for Democrats across the board at the Lemon City Library in Miami on Thursday. But each time he hit the button next to the candidate, the Republican choice showed up.
But at least somebody is monitoring the problem, right? Um…
[T]hey don’t know how widespread the machine problems are because there’s no process for poll workers to quickly report minor issues and no central database of machine problems.
Setting aside the Diebold conspiracy theories, the machines just don’t work very well. At least with paper ballots, there’s a paper trail.
October 31st, 2006 at 2:08 pm
And they want to stick this crap on “smart guns.” No thanks. At least the smart guns will be skewed to shoot at Democrats. There’s some cartoon irony in that.
October 31st, 2006 at 4:09 pm
Heard they were having some problems in the Nashville area and had to bring out some laptop computers to meet the volume of voters.
October 31st, 2006 at 4:14 pm
Have the Pubs been issued round balls, and the Dems squares to vote with? I thought that was the solution developed after the last round of idiocy in that state?
But of course it always the machines fault or any thing other than more people voted for Republicans if a Dem loses…. If a Dem wins, the machines are just fine…
October 31st, 2006 at 4:24 pm
Touch screens slipping out of sync are a pretty common problem. I work with them on a daily basis. You’ll also see problems when the machine is configured for use by somebody looking at the screen from a different angle than the user. For instance, somebody sitting down reaching up to the screen will touch in a different area than somebody standing and reaching down.
It’s less serious when it happens to an entertainment piece of equipment, but those companies STILL put in mechanisms for them to be calibrated on site by people without access to the internals of the machine.
October 31st, 2006 at 7:54 pm
Agreed. Holy cow, I just agreed with Brutal Hugger. The world will now end.
November 1st, 2006 at 7:18 am
If they are anything like the machinges at DPS that we take driving tests on (in Texas), you have to first figure out the offset so you can touch the screen in the right spot to pick the choice you want. Touching the screen directly over your choice of answer will either get you the wrong answer or nothing at all.
November 1st, 2006 at 12:26 pm
The obvious question to me is why ATMs and video games can do this but the voting machine companies cannot.
November 1st, 2006 at 1:28 pm
They aren’t Diebolds, but the ones we use here in SC (iVotronic) can be very easily recalibrated so that where you touch is where it registers the touch.
I’ve worked at several elections using these things and even though it has happened a few times at each election, nobody has ever gotten bothered by it. It’s pretty obvious when it goes wrong and the workers can easily show you how to adjust your positioning or switch you over to another machine.
People usually make a joke or two about it and move on. You’d have to either be really stupid or paranoid to let something like this upset you.