As I was busy chuckling how one party’s candidate was calling the other an “elitist,” and then was unable to answer how many homes he owned (really, how tough of a question is that?), another tidbit came across the news.
We all remember some years back, how people were saying that the electronic voting machines were “losing” votes, and how paranoid that sounded. It seemed like sour grapes, and the Republicans wasted no time is saying this. But as Premier Election Solutions, formerly known as Diebold, has admitted recently, this is precisely what was happening. Although Diebold had suggested that anti-virus software added to machines in Ohio was the main cause of the problem in 2004, it now turns out that the problem was in Deibold’s own programming code, and they now admit that the logic error had been a part of their machines for 10 years. So a simple computer with but one task had an error in it’s code that took a decade to locate. Add to this little discovery that the votes most likely to be dropped are from larger voter jurisdictions, as they upload their respective memory cards to be tallied, and presto-magicko, a Democratic Republic is more of a sham that it already was.
Oh for the days of hanging chads, at least you had to burn those to get rid of the evidence, or you could just have thousands disqualified because they had a name similar to that of a felon (see: Florida, 2000). But as we progress, why on earth are we trusting these companies? If it took them ten years to figure out that perhaps they should be testing their machines with high volumes of information, also known as a real-world test, then why should we believe them now?
And thanks to the 2 year certification period required (which obviously failed miserably), by the government, even though this problem is known, it cannot be fixed in time for the election. Well that just makes all kinds of sense, if you are drink enough tequila. Your tax dollars at work, if only the money spent was on something that actually worked.
But with the elections coming up, one thing is sure. Votes will be cast, and not counted, and while the fault may technically lie with a software “glitch,” the real fault is ours for allowing a system that has proved unreliable to be used again. And while whoever wins will simply call the others sore losers, the sad fact is that we have all lost. And just think, this system is currently used in 34 states. What could possibly go wrong?
