Posted on 11/07/2002 4:57:59 PM PST by PAR35
ABILENE - A Scurry County election error reversed the outcomes in two commissioner races.
A defective computer chip in the county's optical scanner misread ballots Tuesday night and incorrectly tallied a landslide victory for Republicans. Democrats actually won by wide margins.
The problem was discovered when poll workers became suspicious of the margins of the vote, Scurry County Clerk Joan Bunch said.
A new computer chip was flown to Snyder from Dallas, she said. By Wednesday morning, the votes had been counted twice by hand and once again by scanner with the replacement chip.
Republican Robbie Floyd, 69, who lost to Democrat Jerry House, seemed agape even hours after learning of his defeat Wednesday.
"It was hard to believe that that type of mistake had happened," he said.
Incumbent Democrat Chloanne Lindsey said she had conceded the election to Republican Keith Hackfeld when she received a phone call at 3:45 a.m. notifying her of the discrepancy. Later Wednesday morning, he called to congratulate her.
"I felt bad for my opponent," Lindsey said. "I knew how it felt to lose."
Translation: "My GOD! The Republicans are WINNING! Get me the Gore Chip!!"
Also, there was that classic response by the Registar of Votes about midnight election night: "WAIT! Don't install it yet, you nitwit. Wait until the final count is in from all the other counties so we can properly ...ah..er. 'calibrate' the new chip."
A least if they said the chip source was from the Chad Corporation in Florida, then we'd all understand. Poor journalism, I'd say.
A good balloting system should be designed in such a way that every ballot cast will permanently alter some medium in a way that cannot be altered or substituted without detection, and which can be examined without 'breaking the seal'. It should also be designed so that any type of malfunction can be detected immediately.
Paper ballots are actually not all that good in this regard, though the optical-scan ones are probably better than the punched-card ballots. All of those forms of medium have the problem that the seal on the ballot box must be broken to count the ballots, and once the seal is broken there's no way to detect substitution of bogus ballots for good ones.
Probably the best approach would be to modify a mechanical lever-action voting machine so that all of the counters count up only (i.e. they cannot be reset), they have enough digits to prevent them from ever being overflowed/"wrapped", and so that any combination of votes will cause the same number of counters to be incremented (i.e. in a "vote for one" race, there's a "none of the above" counter which gets operated when applicable, etc.) Additionally, the machine should have windows constructed in such a way that a voter who wishes to watch for such things can actually see the proper counters getting incremented [only the input shaft of each counter would be visible, and it would make one full revolution to register a count, so nobody who wasn't watching the counter getting incremented as it happened could see that it had done so].
Unfortunately, I don't know that this country still has the technology needed to produce such a machine at a reasonable price, and I don't really like the idea of "made in China" voting equipment.
Computer voting wouldn't be a bad thing if it was done properly: all of the software associated with an election is stored in bipolar PROMs or similar media, protected by a checksum computed in such a way that there is no way to alter the PROM without such alteration being detectable. Votes would likewise be stored on such PROMs after they were cast. Both the firmware-PROMs and vote-PROMs would be protected by seal-tape by all interested parties, the machines would be constructed so as to allow any interested person to observe that the right PROMs were installed and no other alterations were made, and all PROMs used in an election would be kept on file and never re-used.
Unfortunately, I don't expect anyone to ever actually implement such a thing--probably because it wouldn't leave enough room for "creative adjustments".
You or someone else suggested the other day some type of paper tape system. An obvious paper tail... so why not?
Oh, and on the sign-in sheet, one of the things you could bring along as proof of ID was documentation of a sex change operation.
I'm serious.
This way (a) no one can claim that the machines voted for the wrong candidate - your printout will show who you voted for, and (b) if the machines are rigged, then the recount against the paper hardcopies stored by the election judges will show the discrepency (exactly like happened in this story above.) Nothing complicated here - just a standard LAN printer hooked up to the voting machines.
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