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Massive E-Voting Screwup in Pennsylvania

posted by janrinok on Monday December 16 2019, @09:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the confusing-cost-with-effectiveness dept.

c0lo writes:

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

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday December 17 2019, @09:07PM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday December 17 2019, @09:07PM (#933409) Journal

    “The difference is that Stephenson et al. looked at biomass of individual trees, whereas our study looks at biomass of whole stands of trees,” Pugh said in an email. “Whilst a single tree might continue to pile on more and more biomass, there will be less of such trees in a stand, simply because of their size and as tree stands age, gaps tend to appear due to tree mortality.”

    “So, our conclusion is actually that young forests are responsible for more of the terrestrial carbon sink than old growth forests,” Pugh said.

    Which will be bullshit if you don't consider the vegetation in the under-storey of the forest; in the Amazons, that one is massive and rely on the old trees to develop. Not all forests are Canadian/Siberia tundra.

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