Reply #21: No doubt about a default candidate in Travis County ... [View All]

[ellent]

the eSlate was set up so that if you voted a straight party Democrat ticket and went to the next screen, Bush/Cheney was highlighted. So if you pressed Enter, the vote changed to Bush.
http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2004-10-22/pols_feature18.html

This was no accident, at least not on the part of the manufacturer (Hart Intercivic) which designed a voting system with a default-candidate feature. Logic would tell us that other voting machines have that same capability.

I spoke with a client a couple of days ago. His company is building a product that will use a touch screen, and they have a prototype they've been playing with. I asked how often they had to recalibrate it. He said not very often, they've been using it for a couple of months and haven't had to yet. I've written documentation for touch screen systems before and I never heard about calibration problems until I heard about them with voting machines.

And, as a friend pointed out, if it were a calibration problem why wouldn't it happen on every page of the ballot? I think a host of ills is being blamed on calibration. Touch screen technology isn't as touchy as it appears from this election. But programming errors or mischief could certain play havoc with a voter's ability to get the screen to display correctly.

Why aren't we hearing about calibration problems during pre-election testing? Maybe they don't occur in test mode.

For a list of 10 news reports of touchy touch screens, see:
http://www.votersunite.org/info/previousmessups.asp