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from the confusing-cost-with-effectiveness dept.
Picked via Bruce Schneier's Cryptogram, the story of a massive electronic vote miscount, luckily paper ballots were available
Vote totals in a Northampton County judge's race showed one candidate, Abe Kassis, a Democrat, had just 164 votes out of 55,000 ballots across more than 100 precincts. Some machines reported zero votes for him. In a county with the ability to vote for a straight-party ticket, one candidate's zero votes was a near statistical impossibility. Something had gone quite wrong.
The worse news:
The machines that broke in Northampton County are called the ExpressVoteXL and are made by Election Systems & Software, a major manufacturer of election machines used across the country. The ExpressVoteXL is among their newest and most high-end machines, a luxury "one-stop" voting system that combines a 32-inch touch screen and a paper ballot printer.
The good news was that the chairwoman of the county Republicans realized the numbers made no sense and promptly initiated an investigation. When officials counted the paper backup ballots generated by the same machines, they realized Kassis had narrowly won.
How many trees still need to die until humans learn how to do voting properly?
Note: the original story ran on nytimes, but I respect their choice to not let me read their stories with 'Do not track' activated
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Tuesday December 17 2019, @01:32PM
I agree this analysis is critical to the meaning of the story.
voting machines should be very deterministic, if they can't even easily say what happened in a case like this by running a report with the admin interface, then they were designed so badly this capacity for failure would have to be intentional by design.
Which fits my predictions about everything this company and the republican party do, exactly. Not that democrats never have and never would, not that the two party system is sane, but the republican party in our time is a thin facade of organized crime.
And also what I and every technologist have been saying about blackbox voting since 2000. So it is nice to see my worldview triumph in the prediction market but it is very sad to the evidence of endemic corruption. Like, if this could have been overlooked, the chances are it has already been used to cheat an election somewhere.