January 6, 2008
By Rady Ananda
In a 7,800-word article in today’s New York Times Sunday Magazine, writer Clive Thompson details the myriad of problems associated with touch screen voting systems and devotes only 3% of his essay to similar problems with optical scan systems. If readers actually make it to the last two paragraphs, they’ll read that optical scans – despite Thompson’s prior promotion of them – are also fraught with vulnerabilities.
In Can You Count on These Machines? Thompson correctly describes how “costs ballooned and chaos reigned when Cuyahoga County, Ohio first used Diebold’s AccuVote touch screen system, but inaccurately low-balls the number of memory cards and cartridges that went “missing” during that May 2006 primary. Thompson fails to mention that twenty-eight $4,500 voting machines also went “missing.”
Because the hired watchdog group (Election Science Institute) randomly selected 10% of the precincts to study, we can extrapolate to determine, with a fair degree of confidence, the total number of missing machines to be 280, and the total number of missing memory cards and cartridges to be 890, for the entire county, for that one election. Thompson reports that 200 cards went missing.
He also failed to report that Deputy Director Michael Vu, who oversaw all these “lost” mission critical assets, later resigned and was hired to run San Diego’s elections. In an unfortunate coincidence, at best, a shipment of memory chips to San Diego went missing last month. After Michael Vu’s dismal and shockingly inept handling of Cuyahoga’s May 2006 primary, that he is allowed to serve in any democratic election further defeats confidence in US electoral management bodies.
http://www.democracyfornewhampshire.com/node/view/5296