WP, Dionne: Sarasota County is the canary in the electronic voting coal mine

[DeepModem Mom]

An Electronic Canary
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, November 24, 2006; Page A41

Americans can be grateful that Sarasota County is in Florida and not in Montana or Virginia.

There's nothing wrong with Sarasota, a lovely place. But if the voting snafus in the contest for Florida's 13th District had hung up either of this year's two closest Senate races, we still would not know which party had won control of the Senate.

Supporters of new voting technologies have been patting themselves on the back, saying there were no big voting problems this year. Let them go to Sarasota....

***

Imagine if 18,000 votes had just disappeared in either of the key Senate races. Or imagine a presidential election in which the electoral votes of Florida were decisive and the state was hanging in the balance by -- to pick a number that comes to mind -- 537 votes. And, by the way, in 2000 we could at least see those hanging and dimpled chads. In this case the votes have -- poof! -- simply disappeared.

Despite the Sarasota problem, the state Elections Canvassing Commission certified (Republican Vern) Buchanan's "victory." (Democrat Christine) Jennings has gone to court to demand a new election.

But there is good news here: This is a problem in just one congressional district. Control of the House does not depend on how this race turns out. It is therefore in the interest of both parties, not to mention the country, to be simultaneously aggressive and judicious in figuring out what went wrong in Sarasota and to use that knowledge to fix the nation's voting system before a major disaster strikes. Sarasota is the canary in the electronic coal mine....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/23/AR2006112300965.html

[nashville_brook]

1. thank god control of congress doesn't hang in the balence of this

but people need to get behind this issue as if democracy depended on it.

it does.

[kster]

2. Ya, they need to suggest getting rid of these systems not

trying to fix them, only way, STOP THE MACHINES FROM COUNTING OUR VOTES IN SECRET (period) HCPB....... STOP THE MADNESS!!

"If the courts punt, Congress, which has a right to judge the credentials of its members, should get to the bottom of this. It may be asking the impossible, but Democrats and Republicans should not make this a fight about which party picks up one more seat. Instead, they should conduct a joint inquest into this contest to provide a basis for bipartisan legislation creating national standards for improving our voting systems"

[bleever]

3. You're done finding rot, not when you've found the biggest part,

but when you've found the last, smallest part.

Thank you Sarasota, thank you Mr. Dionne, thank you everyone who remembers that counting election returns is like counting your change at the grocery store.


:thumbsup:

[drm604]

4. Before?

"It is therefore in the interest of both parties, not to mention the country, to be simultaneously aggressive and judicious in figuring out what went wrong in Sarasota and to use that knowledge to fix the nation's voting system before a major disaster strikes."

Before?

Before?

What about 2000 and 2004? I think major disaster has already struck, at least twice.

[Stevepol]

5. OOh, Let me think., what went wrong? What could it be?

"It is therefore in the interest of both parties, not to mention the country, to be simultaneously aggressive and judicious in figuring out what went wrong in Sarasota and to use that knowledge to fix the nation's voting system before a major disaster strikes. Sarasota is the canary in the electronic coal mine...."

"in figuring out what went wrong"

Don't tell me. Let me think. Could it be the fact there's no paper and no verification at all?

Nah, a literate, educated country wouldn't have a system like that where the vote is counted in total secrecy without any verification. That couldn't be. It must be something else. Probably the elections officials. They didn't do their jobs properly.

Let's just blame them. That will solve it. Next time it won't happen, I promise. Just let me do it again, and again, and again, etc. etc. etc. Just keep your eyes on the pretty machines and all those amazing colors and boxes and how you just touch the screen! It's amazing! Aren't we sooooooo advanced and so cutting edge! In fact let's spend even more on our voting system so we can end up paying about $20 per person to vote the way they do in Denver.

Ain't it a great country!

[Cassandra]

6. Great Krugman Op-ed, too.

http://donkeyod.blogspot.com/2006/11/when-votes-disappear-by-paul-krugman.html

When Votes Disappear

"The problem is that the official vote count isn’t credible. In much of the 13th District, the voting pattern looks normal. But in Sarasota County, which used touch-screen voting machines made by Election Systems and Software, almost 18,000 voters — nearly 15 percent of those who cast ballots using the machines — supposedly failed to vote for either candidate in the hotly contested Congressional race. That compares with undervote rates ranging from 2.2 to 5.3 percent in neighboring counties.

Reporting by The Herald-Tribune of Sarasota, which interviewed hundreds of voters who called the paper to report problems at the polls, strongly suggests that the huge apparent undervote was caused by bugs in the ES&S software.

About a third of those interviewed by the paper reported that they couldn’t even find the Congressional race on the screen. This could conceivably have been the result of bad ballot design, but many of them insisted that they looked hard for the race. Moreover, more than 60 percent of those interviewed by The Herald-Tribune reported that they did cast a vote in the Congressional race — but that this vote didn’t show up on the ballot summary page they were shown at the end of the voting process.

If there were bugs in the software, the odds are that they threw the election to the wrong candidate. An Orlando Sentinel examination of other votes cast by those who supposedly failed to cast a vote in the Congressional race shows that they strongly favored Democrats, and Mr. Buchanan won the official count by only 369 votes. The fact that Mr. Buchanan won a recount — that is, a recount of the votes the machines happened to record — means nothing."

[usregimechange]

7. MSM needs to have this shoved down their throats apparently.

[drm604]

8. Actually, I saw this story on one of the broadcast network's evening news shows.

I believe it was this past Tuesday or Wednesday. I think it was the 6:30 PM ABC network news but I'm not positive. It was either ABC, NBC, or CBS. I was at a relative's house and it was on a non cable-connected portable TV in their kitchen so I know it was one of the big three broadcast networks.

I walked in in the middle of the story and other people in the room were having conversations so I didn't see and hear the whole thing but from what I saw it seemed to be pretty fair. They explained about the large under-vote and about how it only occurred with people who voted on machines in one district and that it was totally out of line with other districts. The frame seemed to be that something was apparently wrong with the vote totals due to a malfunction. I didn't see any suggestion that it was fraud rather than machine error, but at least the story was put out and it seemed to be strongly suggested that there was a mistake and that the machines were to blame.

[BeFree]

9. Hmmmmmm

Methinks the canary done died.