Reply #7: Sarasota: Could a Bug Have Lost Votes?

[kpete]

Freedom to Tinker
… is your freedom to understand, discuss, repair, and modify the technological devices you own.

Sarasota: Could a Bug Have Lost Votes?
Tuesday February 27, 2007 by Ed Felten

At this point, we still don’t know what caused the high undervote rate in Sarasota’s Congressional election. There are two theories. The State-commissioned study released last week argues that for the theory that a badly designed ballot caused many voters to not see that race and therefore not cast a vote.

Today I want to make the case for the other theory: that a malfunction or bug in the voting machines caused votes to be not recorded. The case sits on four pillars: (1) The postulated behavior is consistent with a common type of computer bug. (2) Similar bugs have been found in voting machines before. (3) The state-commissioned study would have been unlikely to find such a bug. (4) Studies of voting data show patterns that point to the bug theory.

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Conclusion

What conclusion can we draw? Certainly we cannot say that a bug definitely caused undervotes. But we can say with confidence that the bug theory is still in the running, and needs to be considered alongside the ballot design theory as a possible cause of the Sarasota undervotes. If we want to get to the bottom of this, we need to investigate further, by looking more deeply into undervote patterns, and by examining the voting machine hardware and software.

more at:
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1126