Watch Out For Voting Day Bugs (WaPo)

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/27/AR2006082700566.html

Watch Out For Voting Day Bugs

By Dick Thornburgh and Richard Celeste
Monday, August 28, 2006; A15


For many years election officials have kept the machinery of American democracy running in the face of sometimes overwhelming difficulties. But this November's elections will pose unprecedented challenges to them.

For many jurisdictions, the 2006 elections will see the first large-scale use of electronic voting systems. Many organizations have learned the hard way that deployment and use of new technologies on a large scale virtually guarantee big surprises and unintended consequences: sudden system crashes, corrupted data or painfully slow systems. The usual remedies are to develop, test and evaluate small-scale prototypes before committing to organization-wide upgrades in technology, and to keep both old and new systems running for a while so that failures in the new system do not paralyze operations.

Unfortunately, faced with the deadlines for deploying enhanced voting systems that were set by the Help America Vote Act of 2002, most electoral jurisdictions have been unable to follow this prudent path. That's why we believe it will be essential this year that jurisdictions have backup and contingency plans that anticipate a wide range of possible failures in their electronic voting systems, including those that occur in the middle of the voting process on Election Day (or days).
...

For any given jurisdiction, the likelihood of a specific problem is low. But with 9,500 jurisdictions in the United States it's likely that problems will occur in some of them. Indeed, many of the problems described above have actually happened in one jurisdiction or another. We don't mean to suggest there will be widespread failures of electronic voting systems. But in this election year, the challenges facing election officials and the nation are formidable. Prudence and reasonable contingency planning should rule at this moment of truth for electronic voting, as election officials across the land work to retain public confidence in the face of new challenges.

Dick Thornburgh is a former Republican governor of Pennsylvania. Richard Celeste is a former Democratic governor of Ohio. They chaired a recent study by the National Academies' National Research Council on electronic voting.

The authors don't point out any of the obvious solutions, like having paper ballots in all races that can be recounted if, say, there are 10 times as many votes as registered voters recorded in a race.

[intaglio]

1. Only one thing to say to WaPo - No Sh*t, Sherlock n/t

self edit for an i