Reply #3: Human or Machine Error: What's The Truth? [View All]

[kpete]

Human or Machine Error: What's The Truth?
By John Gideon, VotersUnite.org and VoteTrustUSA
July 18, 2006

Some elections officials constantly invoke "voter trust and confidence" as the most important part of their jobs. In that invocation they cite disinformation about there being no incidents of voting machine problems as they blame all problems on the human factor. It's a strange defense of voting machines because it is completely false and there are stacks of evidence of failures to prove that it is a false defense. That is unless they go back to humans designing and building the systems; the failures are certainly all human if you go back that far.

On June 15, the Elections Assistance Commission held their monthly meeting, in Washington DC, with the intent of getting a report on a project they are funding that will provide a set of guidelines for election management and that will be available for use by every county in the country. Even in the atmosphere of a meeting that probably had few people in the audience and that was conducted with the typical sugary sweet politeness of a publicly held federal committee meeting the commissioners, and at least one of their 'insider' speakers, practiced delivering their misinformation. Perhaps they are trying to convince themselves that they must 'trust and have confidence' by repeating the false premise that voting machines do not fail, humans fail?

Tom Wilkey is the Executive Director of the EAC. In the meeting he had this to say about the status of voting machines in the 2006 primaries, "There have been some issues, but none appear to be systematic issues related to the operation of the voting equipment."

In his testimony Dr. Brit Williams, who was one of the two people to report on the election management manual, made this stunningly ill-informed statement, "It is difficult to find a single incident where an election anomaly was a direct result of the voting system." He then followed that statement with another, "……election anomalies are rarely caused by the voting system. They are caused by human mistakes, not by people intent upon malicious mischief or fraud, but by honest, well-meaning people making perfectly normal human mistakes."

more at:
http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1545&Itemid=26