voting machines

There is a diary at the top of the recommended list on Daily Kos citing voting problems in NYC with some accusations that Hillary's people are disenfranchising black voters. A genuine red flag was raised when it was noticed that a heavily black election district in Harlem was recorded as having zero votes for Barack Obama. This is clearly unlikely and therefore genuinely raised people's concern. And it brings up several important issues regarding voting machines. But one thing this should NOT cause is accusations of fraud on the part of Clinton's campaign. From first hand experience, I can suggest that the problem was not an intentional undercount of Obama voters, but a maintenance problem with the voting machines used in NYC.

In NYC we use very old lever machines that record the votes using mechanical counters inside the machine. It is all mechanical with each vote for a candidate tuning a counter wheel inside by one digit. As long as these machines are properly set to zero before voting begins and the votes in the end are tallied in an open manner, and as long as the machines are not re-set before the vote is properly tallied, fraud can be avoided. Of course you can see how if an election board is corrupt there is room for fraud, but with bipartisan election boards and with a chance for any campaign or local political club to see the backs of the machines at the end of voting and record their own tally, the system seems pretty fair and open.

The foundation of any democracy has to be free and fair election. I have written considerably about the danger the over-priced, insecure and non-verifiable DRE eVote machines are. By now you'd think the evidence was more than enough to kill any interest any state might have in these machines.

To me one of the deciding factors should be the fact that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has advocated the decertification of these machines because:

According to an NIST paper to be discussed at a meeting of election regulators at NIST headquarters in Gaithersburg, Md., on Dec. 4 and 5, DRE vote totals cannot be audited because the machines are not software independent.

In other words, there is no means of verifying vote tallies other than by relying on the software that tabulated the results to begin with.

The machines currently in use are "more vulnerable to undetected programming errors or malicious code," according to the paper.

The NIST paper also noted that, "potentially, a single programmer could 'rig' a major election."

But there recently is yet more evidence that the DRE machines suck. Florida under Jeb Bush was a state that embraced the DRE machines early. Perhaps Jeb should have waited. DRE machines are probably responsible for an 18,000 vote undercount in Florida's FL-13 Congressional race in 2006 which more or less made those election results a farce.