The article is now out and can be seen at the link below:
Can You Count on Voting Machines?
"Bugs in the Machines"
Editor & Publisher's editor Greg Mitchell, has tipped off The BRAD BLOG late this afternoon, that the New York Times Magazine is set to run a "massive" cover-story this Sunday, on the entire e-voting disaster titled "The Bugs in the Machines."
Some of the Money Quotes:
The massive Clive Thompson article, titled "The Bugs in the Machines," is quite chilling. "After the 2000 election," it opens, "counties around the country rushed to buy new computerized voting machines. But it turns out that these machines may cause problems worse than hanging chads. Is America ready for another contested election?
The earliest critiques of digital voting booths came from the fringe — disgruntled citizens and scared-senseless computer geeks — but the fears have now risen to the highest levels of government.
The dKos "Fraudsters" have been tellin' it far and wide for 6 years now.
It’s difficult to say how often votes have genuinely gone astray. Michael Shamos, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who has examined voting-machine systems for more than 25 years, estimates that about 10 percent of the touch-screen machines "fail" in each election. "In general, those failures result in the loss of zero or one vote," he told me. "But they’re very disturbing to the public."
Oh well what is ten or more 10% failure rate. Small potatoes.
During this year’s presidential primaries, roughly one-third of all votes will be cast on touch-screen machines. (New Hampshire voters are not in this group; they will vote on paper ballots, some of which are counted in optical scanners.) The same ratio is expected to hold when Americans choose their president in the fall. It is a very large chunk of the electorate. So what scares election observers is this: What happens if the next presidential election is extremely close and decided by a handful of votes cast on machines that crashed? Will voters accept a presidency decided by ballots that weren’t backed up on paper and existed only on a computer drive? And what if they don’t?
One Third of all votes: A Rovian Wet Dream.
Okay How Bad is it REALLY?
THE QUESTION, OF COURSE, is whether the machines should be trusted to record votes accurately. Ed Felten doesn’t think so. Felten is a computer scientist at Princeton University, and he has become famous for analyzing — and criticizing — touch-screen machines. In fact, the first serious critics of the machines — beginning 10 years ago — were computer scientists. One might expect computer scientists to be fans of computer-based vote-counting devices, but it turns out that the more you know about computers, the more likely you are to be terrified that they’re running elections.
(Brad Blog does caution that there is a mistake in the article:
"One quick inaccuracy in the story, for now, which is small, but we feel important to correct for the record: Once again, Prof. Ed Felten of Princeton University has misled the NY Times. He is interviewed in the story, in relation to the study his team at Princeton did of a Diebold touch-screen voting system in 2006, in which they were able to easily implant a virus. It's reported, in the story, that the machine was "anonymously donated" to him.
It was not. Which he knows. And the continuance of Felten's behavior here, and his refusal to acknowledge the correct source for the system, without which his work could not have occurred, is highly unethical. Particulalry for a scientist."
Does the Name Jennings mean anything to You?
IF YOU WANT TO GET a sense of the real stakes in voting-machine politics, Christine Jennings has a map to show you. It is a sprawling, wall-size diagram of the voting precincts that make up Florida’s 13th district, and it hangs on the wall of her campaign office in Sarasota, where she ran for the Congressional seat in November 2006. Jennings, a Democrat, lost the seat by 369 votes to the Republican, Vern Buchanan, in a fierce fight to replace Katherine Harris. But Jennings quickly learned of an anomaly in the voting: some 18,000 people had "undervoted." That is, they had voted in every other race — a few dozen were on the ballot, including a gubernatorial contest — but abstained in the Jennings-Buchanan fight. A normal undervote in any given race is less than 3 percent. In this case, a whopping 13 percent of voters somehow decided to not vote.
And the results of this marvelous technological tool:
Public crises of confidence in voting machines used to come along rarely, every few decades. But now every single election cycle seems to provoke a crisis, a thirst for a new technological fix. The troubles of voting machines may subside as optical scanning comes in, but they’re unlikely to ever go away.
That is sort of what happens when there are 3, 4 or 5 screwy elections in a row...ever since the advent of E-voting.
Maybe...Just maybe the issue is about to hit the radar screen Big-Time.