Touchscreen Vote Records Lost in Florida

[Emillereid]

By HILARY ROXE, Associated Press Writer

MIAMI - A computer crash erased detailed records from Miami-Dade County's first widespread use of touchscreen voting machines, raising again the specter of elections troubles in Florida, where the new technology was supposed to put an end to such problems.


The crashes occurred in May and November of 2003, erasing information from the September 2002 gubernatorial primaries and other elections, elections officials said Tuesday.



The malfunction was made public after the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, a citizen's group, requested all data from the 2002 gubernatorial primary between Democratic candidates Janet Reno (news - web sites) and Bill McBride.



In December, officials began backing up the data daily, to help avoid similar data wipeouts in the future, said Seth Kaplan, spokesman for the county's elections supervisor, Constance Kaplan.



The loss of data underscores problems with the touchscreen voting machines, the citizen's group said. "This is a disaster waiting to happen," said Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, chairwoman of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition. "Of course it's worrisome.".....more....

There may be some doubt that Bush is crazy, but there should be no doubt that he and his cronies are thieves. I recently saw Greg Palast and he said that the tech experts he's talked to reckon that the repukes won't even have to hack into the voting boxes so much as make sure that when they crash and malfunction, etc. in poorer, more democratic neighborhoods, no tech support is available. Apparently that's the pattern that emerged in the Nov., 2002 election where they used electronic voting machines.

[Joanne98]

1. This is big news.

How do we know Jeb won his election. We don't.

[mantis49]

2. Link?

Not surprising. Geez, I hope election officials ban BBV.

[Emillereid]

3. I wonder if it would be possible to recruit an 'army of techies' --

train thousands of tech support election observers to 'man' the voting places where these electronic voting machines are used and be able to fix any problems immediately. We could recruit from university computer science programs and the like. Volunteers for election honesty!

[mtnester]

4. All you have to do is remove

a couple of dll files after the thing is up and running, then trip over the power cord, causing a reboot, then bingo...crash when you try to run programs.

There are other ways to do it as well, causing a crash is easy, I reproduce crashes all the time at work to try to teach people how to recover from some commons issues if I am on vacation. And I am only a "learn it by fire" geek, not an expert.

One obscure dll file missing or in the wrong place stops the entire Office suite and Outlook software from working at all. Stops the installer from working, all kinds of mayhem, stops any Microsoft product from working, but Windows will boot. And believe me, it is obscure as heck, and the location where the file should be makes NO sense. What someone could EASILY do knowing the software inside out; or with a memory stick or with a jump drive...OR A MODEM CONNECTION OR WIRELESS CONNECTION..is truly frightening.

NO ONE can tie software down that hard from security risks...ask Bill Gates if it is possible.

[Moderator]

5. locking

it's a dupe, and has no link.