Ok kids nothing to see here show's over show's o--
Oh my god a horrible plane crash! Hey everybody get a look of this flaming wreckage! Come on everybody don't be shy crowd around. Come on crowd around.
Five months away from a presidential election, state officials have learned that the touchscreen voting machines now used in Miami-Dade, Broward and nine other counties have a software flaw that could make it impossible to do manual recounts in close races.
The state Division of Elections and the makers of the machines, Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb., believe they have found a remedy for the problem -- which involves linking the voting equipment with laptop computers to extract the information.
But the lateness of the solution, and the state's certification of voting equipment that fails to perform as federal law requires, has created an election-year tempest that is prompting high-level handwringing about the paperless system.
Yeah, so the voting machines in Broward County, Miami-Dade county, and a bunch of others actually can't do proper recounts, even with the fact that a recount probably involves nothing more than pushing a button.
Would anyone now like to tell me that these systems are safe, secure, reliable, and shouldn't produce a paper trail? THE DAMN THINGS CAN'T EVEN RECOUNT THE ELECTRONIC VOTES PROPERLY! And Hell, look at this...
In an audit performed by Orlando Suarez, division director of Miami-Dade County's technology department, after a May 2003 election in Miami Beach, the event log scrambled the serial numbers of the voting machines, making it difficult to figure out which machines were being audited.
In an October audit of the Homestead election, Suarez found that the event log failed to account for 162 votes that had been cast...
State and county election officials acknowledge the existence of the problem but insist that it can be resolved.
Wexler and advocates for the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition ask how the state can say that with such certainty if the glitch prevents elections officials from even detecting if the computer is malfunctioning.
So let's make this crystal clear now. The Machines are losing votes. They don't produce a paper trail. They can't do a proper recount. And there's no way to tell until after the election is over whether or not the machine worked properly.
In other words, that is the complete nightmare scenario. If this can happen in a situation where 160 votes are lost, then the odds are far better than 0 that there will be a similar glitch that will wipe out a whole machine's tally. Or a whole location's tally. Or several locations. Literally thousands of votes could go away in a major election with just 1 or 2 undetectable glitches.
My advice to the entire state of Florida is to vote absentee. I know I will even on the other side of the country, and my state at least had the brains to outlaw the damn things. Publicize this! Before it happens to your state!