Another touching story

One last (I think) catch-up item.

Problems continue to plague the modern miracle of touch-screen voting. As Mother Jones noted,

Nearly 10 million people are voting via computer this primary season. Most election officials in e-voting states hailed the outcome of Super Tuesday as a success for the largest test of electronic kiosks to date. Still, some of the six million California citizens who tried it found machines that didn't boot up and coding software that failed to match votes with those who cast them. Some poll workers found that the programs they were called on to administer weren't the ones they'd been trained for. Encoding problems even omitted propositions from some ballots.

An article MoJo linked to in California's Tri-Valley Herald had some disturbing details on some of the problems.

At about one in every six polling places in Alameda County, touchscreen voting ground to a temporary halt, and poll workers doled out paper provisional ballots to voters in dozens of precincts.

Voting technicians scrambled to get electronic voting running again, and troubleshooters hurried to keep precincts supplied in paper ballots. But paper ballots ran out in several precincts, and poll workers told voters to come back later.

Some did. Some didn't.

It was a similar story in San Diego County.

As of election day evening, state officials had no idea if the breakdowns and provisional balloting would have an impact on the results of the elections or even how many provisional ballots were cast.

Roughly 125 precincts got back up and running within an hour or two of the opening of the polls, according to Diebold and local elections officials. But they missed much of the morning rush hour.

At least 43 precincts took longer. At one San Leandro church, poll workers scrapped one encoder and used a backup machine for 15 minutes before it, too, stopped working.

One voter who had a problem was advised to call the county registrar, only to be told "there had been so many complaints they couldn't call them all back."

This is California's third election with touchscreen voting and even now there are breakdowns and confusions that resulted in an unknown number of miscast votes, provisional votes, and even people being turned away from polling places. And there is still no paper trail.

When is it going to sink in that technologically this system still isn't ready for prime time and that philosophically, so long as there is no paper trail, it never will be?

My most recent of several posts on this was on February 16.