New Voting Machines may fail, clerk warns

[bfealk]

This article appeared in the Oakland Press today on the front page.

http://tinyurl.com/rwlar

[GreenEyedLefty]

1. I hope all voting machines in Oakland Co. are not replaced

The machines at my precinct are perfectly functional optical scanners into which you feed your ballot. The machine will flash green if your ballot is done correctly, or flash red and spit it out if it's incorrect.

I can see the possibility and advantages to the GOP if they all go black box, though. Ugh.

[TahitiNut]

2. Unless there's a statistically valid hand count

... there's absolutely no assurance that the scanners are tallying the ballots correctly. While I strongly prefer a scanner to a touchscreen because it has a verifiable 'original' paper document that can be audited, a failure to regularly incorporate a hand-count validation phase in tallying the vote opens the door to all manner of abuses.

By "statistically valid," I mean a sufficient sample size to assure a 98% confidence that the outcomes, at the precinct level, are as tallied. That means that the sample size would become larger as the percentage margins in individual races/measures became smaller. For particularly close races, this would result in a 100% manual recount.