Sequoia / Smartmatic e-voting fiasco in Chicago

London 24.03.06 | Somewhat I feel vindicated. In August last year I posted an extremely thorough piece of investigative blogging regarding Smartmatic; the e-voting machines vendor, which owns Sequoia, that has proven so useful to Venezuela's wannabe dictator Hugo Chavez. The recent e-voting fiasco in Chicago comes to prove the hypothesis that one thing is to observe how rigged electoral processes in far away lands, which do not affect Americans, are overlooked, or simply ignored, by the mainstream media and an entirely different matter when similar problems corrode the transparency and outcome of elections in US soil.

I don't know how the electric voting system works because apparently since the 2004 election i was taken off the voter list by cook county. I went in Tuesday, and the election judge didn't have my name on the list. I went home looked up my name on the cook county election website, said I wasn't found. This is odd because not only did I vote in 2004, but I was also recently called for Jury duty. I wonder how many illegals voted in cook county elections while I couldn't.

E-voting will work if:

1. The machine voted on simply prints out a paper ballot to be handed by the voter to the poll worker.

2. The machine voted on is NOT the machine that also does the vote tabulating. The ballot printed should be some form of scan-sheet that is fed through a counting machine.

Went to vote Tuesday (Cook County IL) we were offered the choice of optical scan or touch screen equipment.

My wifw, who's a CPA and spends about half her time certifying financial applications developed in-house at her company, elected to use the touch screen equipment at the urging of the election judges, who thought it was Really Cool.

She promptly found a design or programing error that caused a vote for a candidate go to go unrecorded (it appeared to have
been accepted, but if you looked carefully at the next step it had not).

Much consternation, four election judges clustering around to try to fix this - so much for the sanctity of the secret ballot.

After a bit, everyone agrees that the system was in fact the problem - much additional futzing, vote still not accepted.

Finally, my wife loses patience and finds a workaround – enter a bogus write-in candidate, clear that field and – VOILA - vote accepted!

Much wonderment “But, it's worked OK for EVERYONE else...”

Much befuddlement at the suggestion that possibly "it had worked OK for NO ONE ELSE"...

Nah, to blatent - needs mod to following;
Electronic voting Chicago/Philly style...

If VOTE = D then D = D + 1, R = R - .01
If VOTE = R then D = D + 1, R = R + .01
Round results for 'R' accumulator at each reading, truncate negative values to 0

Electronic voting Caracas...

If VOTE = Hugo then Hugo = Hugo + 1
If VOTE = non-Hugo then Hugo = Hugo + 1, Call Policia

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