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E-voting problems in CA

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E-voting problems in CA

Posted 03/09/2004 @ 4:33 PM, by Hannibal

As a follow-up on my previous post on e-voting problems in the recent round of elections and primaries, the LA Times has more on the situation in Orange County.

Poll workers struggling with a new electronic voting system in last week's election gave thousands of Orange County voters the wrong ballots, according to a Times analysis of election records. In 21 precincts where the problem was most acute, there were more ballots cast than registered voters...

David Hart, chairman of Texas-based Hart InterCivic, which manufactured Orange County's voting system, said it would be impossible to identify which voters cast ballots in the wrong precincts because of steps the company had taken to ensure voter secrecy. For this reason, an exact account of miscast ballots is impossible.

Well, y'know, if there's no mechanism in place for verifying the legitimacy of the votes, and there's no paper trail, then you can't actually have reliable elections. As The Corner's Andrew Stuttaford notes, "sometimes the sky really is falling." With most of the pundits on both sides of the fence predicting a close presidential race in November, shouldn't we get on top of this before we have a major national crisis on our hands? A clearly demonstrable nationwide epidemic of unrecoverable voting machine malfunctions in a close and hotly contested presidential race has the potential to make the hullabaloo over "hanging chads" look like trivial by comparison.

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