CNN: Voting machines could bring Election Day glitches

[Turborama]

Source: CNN


Updated 1 hour, 30 minutes ago

By Brandon Griggs

Eight years after Florida's hanging chads exasperated voters and helped usher in sweeping changes in voting technology, many election observers remain concerned about the accuracy of the electronic voting systems most Americans will use November 4.

Touch-screen machines can occasionally fail or register votes for unintended candidates. Optical-scan systems can have trouble reading paper ballots that are too long or marked with the wrong ink. At least one study suggests that electronic voting machines can be easily hacked.

And some 9 million voters, including many in the battleground states of Ohio and Florida, will use equipment that has changed since March, increasing concerns about errors next Tuesday.

"You can be almost certain that there will be irregularities in some places around the country," said Rep. Rush Holt, D-New Jersey. "The problem now is that roughly a third of voters nationwide will use unverifiable electronic machines. So if there are uncertainties, there will be no way to resolve them."

With early voting under way in 31 states, these problems have already surfaced. In recent weeks, voters in West Virginia, Colorado, Tennessee and Texas have reported that touch-screen machines registered their votes, at least initially, for the wrong candidate or party.


Read more: http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/10/30/voting.machines/

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Video:
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/10/30/voting.machines/#cnnSTCVideo

[Veritas_et_Aequitas]

1. About time they said something.

"With early voting under way in 31 states, these problems have already surfaced. In recent weeks, voters in West Virginia, Colorado, Tennessee and Texas have reported that touch-screen machines registered their votes, at least initially, for the wrong candidate or party."

Of course they don't mention that the vast majority of these faulty machines are switching Democrat votes to non-Democrats.

[antimatter98]

2. I don't trust CNN. This could be the start of a msm effort

to create cover for Republican operatives stealing the election.

If the polls are showing tight numbers, this is a real possibility.

I would expect CNN and Fox especially to start touting 'voting machine' issues
to set the stage for a very very confusing election.

Since Congress did not mandate 'paper' voting, and the public at
large didn't demand it, we're stuck with this mess,
and unless Obama numbers are positively huge, we could be in for a repeat of
..the past.

Some machines have error rates of 25 percent or more.

I think Republicans are going to play the error rate game along with voter suppression
and the last minute shower of nasty commercials and speeches to narrow the gap and then flip
two/three percent for a McCain win. imho.

[defendandprotect]

3. "Could"...???? Expect a huge FU on election day -- only way GOP can approach this . . .!!!

There will be MAJOR and nationwide interference with the voting of Democrats --

[subterranean]

4. This is news?

It's been known that the voting machines were prone to problems, whether intentional or not, since before the 2004 election. You would think they'd have had enough time to iron out these 'bugs' by now.

[jb5150]

5. We need a standardized ballot

[dipsydoodle]

6. We had that on CNN International

last night here in the UK but I'd already concluded that you lot are out of your tiny minds not insisting that you have paper ballots as we do in the UK.