Vic Ryckaert, writing for the Indy Star, reports more problems with Election Systems & Software voting machines. In Marion County, the company did not print instructions on ballots for the non-partisan school board elections in Decatur and Washington townships. In addition, the first batch of ballots ES&S delivered for the primary elections were “rife with mistakes.” There were new errors in the replacement ballots.
“They don’t proof anything before they send it to us,” [Marion County Clerk Doris] Sadler said. “I would love to fire them. I’ve had three years of serious issues with this company.”
Meanwhile, Johnson County received its absentee ballots two weeks after ballots were supposed to be mailed to voters who submitted absentee applications. ES&S also failed to program Johnson County’s touch screen voting machines.
ES&S has been in the news previously in 2003 for failure to provide software that was fully certified by the Indiana Election Commission. It compounded the problem by loading uncertified software on the machines then replaced the uncertified software with files that were incompatible with the programs that count the votes.
I understand the idea behind electronic voting but the implementation has been a mess. Don’t forget the security issues with all the machines (regardless of the manufacturer) and the lack of a paper trail on most of them, too.
I think we’d all be better off using paper ballots.
I think optical scan ballots are probably the best option.
It was only after the 2000 Fl Election that voting irregularities were recognized as a major problem. There have always been discrepancies in vote counting and Im not sure we will ever be able to fix it.Isnt 1-2% error considered a ‘good’ election? That would be quite a few votes in populated states.In fact, Chicago and other cities have been cited as examples why voting irregularity in ‘other areas’ shouldnt be an issue.
Computers have all kinds of problems that aren’t obviously visible with machines that have hidden source code.
I’d only trust computers with open source code that anyone can analyze.