Touched in the head

Here's another possibility to add to the list of glitches with computerized voting that could be rectified by a voter-verified receipt (or, for that matter, by dumping the suckers altogether in favor of optical scanners or some other form of paper ballot): straightforward cockups.

Jacksonville, NC (AP, November 4) - More than 4,500 votes have been lost in one North Carolina county because officials believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. Scattered other problems may change results in races around the state.

Local officials said UniLect Corp., the maker of the county's electronic voting system, told them that each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the limit was actually 3,005 votes. ...

Officials said 3,005 early votes were stored, but 4,530 were lost.

Jack Gerbel, president and owner of Dublin, Calif.-based UniLect, said Thursday that the county's elections board was given incorrect information. There is no way to retrieve the missing data, he said.

Have you ever, ever heard of "running out of room" to store paper ballots in an election?

The votes lost do not appear to have been able to affect the outcome of any of the races in the county, but depending on the outcome of counting of provisional ballots, there is a possibility that two statewide races could be affected. If the problem cropped up in more than one county, that probability - plus the chance that races in those other counties could be affected - grows.

But even if it turns out that no race was affected, there is still the matter pointed out by voter Alecia Williams, whose vote was among those lost.

"The point is not whether the votes would have changed things, it's that they didn't get counted at all," Williams said.

I say trash the suckers. Use them for video game machines, which is about what they are qualified for.

Footnote: Oh, wait, forget all that because, as always, the makers of the machines insist it's someone else's fault. Gerbel (which I keep wanting to spell gerbil for some reason) said

that the machines flash a warning message when there is no more room for storing ballots.

"Evidently, this message was either ignored or overlooked," he wrote.

Exactly why this is something voting officials should have been checking for after having been told this machine could store more than three times as many votes as it could goes unexplained.

More to the point, why did it appear to voters that it was still working? Why, instead of flashing some apparently quite unobtrusive warning, wasn't the machine programmed to tell the next voter something like "This terminal's ability to store votes has been reached. Please inform election officials." and stop allowing inputs? That would hardly be a radical step or a problem in programming. So why wasn't it done that way? Sheer programming stupidity? Or a desire to conceal mistakes, figuring that if only a few votes (instead of 60% of the total cast) were lost, no one would notice?

But there was a flashing warning! Not good enough, Mr. Gerbel. Not nearly good enough.