E-Voting Glitch Alters Election Outcome

An anonymous reader writes "According to a local news source, 'A recently found computer glitch in the voting machines in Franklin County, Indiana has given a Democrat enough votes to bump a Republican from victory in a County Commissioner's race.' Any ideas on how we can check for similar problems in other close elections?"

Easy

[Marxist Hacker 42]

In any county where there is a close race, check the laws on recount and find enough people to insist upon a recount. Should be done countrywide at this point, given the problems we've seen.

Why the whole freakin' country can't just go to a proven system like Oregon's mail in ballots checked by scantron is beyond me. If it's good enough technology for SAT tests, it's damned well good enough technology for elections.

Challenges Happening Throughout the Country

[jezor]

There are a number of voting machine-related challenges on the national level. Ralph Nader has successfully requested a recount in New Hampshire, and groups like BlackBoxVoting [blackboxvoting.org] are working on fraud audits. Also, in Ohio, the Libertarian and Green Party candidates are reportedly [times-standard.com] joining together to demand a recount. There are local challenges going on as well. {Jonathan}

-------------------
Prof. Jonathan I. Ezor
Assistant Professor of Law and Technology
Director, Institute for Business, Law and Technology (IBLT)
Touro Law Center
300 Nassau Road, Huntington, NY 11743
Tel: [phone] x412 Fax: [phone]
e-mail: [e-mail] [mailto]
BizLawTech Blog: http://iblt.tourolaw.edu/blog [tourolaw.edu]

Franklin County, Indiana

[Lars T.]

Not Franklin County, Ohio [cnn.com], where Bush got 666% of the vote. (well 667.3981%, but who is counting ;-).

According to USA today [usatoday.com]

Franklin is the only Ohio county to use Danaher Controls's ELECTronic 1242, an older-style touchscreen voting system.

So it must be the name of the county, not the technology, because the machines are from different manufacturers. Errm, yeah.

Not just a glitch, it's fishy

[MarkusQ]

I don't think these electronic voting machine problems should be characterized as trivial "glitches". They are complete failures of the software, since the whole purpose of these machines is to accurately count votes. Would losing a few hundred database records at your company be considered a glitch?

To put a finer point on it, what would you call an "error" in banking software that systematically deposited money into the wrong persons account? A glitch? Or what about a spyware program that consistently failed to report one particular company's spyware?

It isn't as if this software "failed" in the usual sense of the word--which implies that no benifit accrued to anyone. They didn't spit out error messages. They didn't burst into flames, or lock up. Instead, they superficially appeared to work perfectly but in fact were secretly highly biased.

-- MarkusQ