|At November 02, 2004 4:03 PM, Richards, Steve
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]
|Sent Re: Voting Experience

<snip>

|They stated that only a moron would have a problem voting on
|those machines.  And yet I've already heard complaints about
|that machine. Well .............?????  Does that mean that
|some morons are voting today?

Likely different machines in different areas:  In Broward County (home to
the Y2K "pregnant" chads), the machines *didn't* give you a receipt (or any
kind of paper verification).  And they didn't prompt for confirmation of a
non-vote for a race, though there is a verification screen that summarizes
the voting results prior to acceptance.

And there were numerous (though still a very low percentage) reports of
glitches where the verification screen came up with results exactly opposite
what the individual pressed.  In the ones I heard about, this happened with
each and every race and question, so it was pretty obvious, and was resolved
after flagging down poll workers.

But of course it begs several questions: (1) If glitch can occur between the
selection and the verification display, how can we know that one can't occur
between the verification and the record creation?  And (2) How do we know
the glitch exactly reversed all results when it did occur?  Yes you can
argue that of course you should verify each selection -- and that is easy
enough to do so in a race (even if all the summary says is the last name) --
but when some are just Questions and are summarized as (for example)
"Question No. Three ...... YES", it can be easy to mismatch the number to
the content.

Even the races had some oddities.  For example, the summary screen indicated
"U.S. President and Vice President" followed by just one name.

Of course, the old mechanical voting machines had no voter verification,
either.  But they sure did give a satisfying tactile "kerchunk" when you
finished.  Now that was *real* voting <g>.

Peter Lundell

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