Scanner glitch almost doubles the number of votes cast in an election

[thewayne]

It added 4800 votes to an election where only 5600 people voted.

*sigh*

This is not a case of evote machines glitching, apparently this is scanned paper ballots. No one kept a manual tally of the votes and things got a little screwed up.

What was it Reagan said? Trust but verify?

http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/articles/2009/06/04/news/local/doc4a26be929b134639509302.txt

Comments

[silveradept]

Trust, but verify. Use the machines for convenience, but make sure that there's a human copy somewhere just in case the machines screw up or are deliberately sabotaged.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

At least they had a paper trail they could check against.

[silveradept]

Oh. It didn't sound like there was much of a paper trail there, which is why it took so long for them to figure the actual vote totals, but if there was one, good.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

If they were using a scanner, they had paper ballots, so they had a fallback position. They just trusted the machine too much.

When I wrote a vote tally system that had a public/cable TV web interface, we made sure to double-check my totals vs what the City Clerk had. That's one of the beautiful things about a database: if the input is correct, and the logic is correct, the output is correct. (barring catastrophic problems)

[silveradept]

That's very nice. I do wish that we could be certain out logics are correct, but too many Diebold machines have soured us of that notion.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

What we did here was we used the County's mark-sense scanners at each voting location for a City Council election for three seats. The individual locations scan the ballot in to a lockbox, then after the polls close they print a summary, count the ballots, account for spoiled ballots, then bring the whole shebang in to City Hall. The City Clerk gives me the total for that location, I plug in the location number and votes for each candidate into a database which our web server generates pages from. It was a very cool project to accomplish.

But at no time does the voter touch an electronic device to vote, only when they feed it into the scanner/lockbox does electronics enter in to it.

[silveradept]

I like that system. I like it very much. We could do with more of that kind of system.