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Many still assume that there is only one kind of vote fraud: a bunch of crooked poll workers filling out ballots in the names of dead people. While that does still happen, it’s only one out of dozens of completely different methods, all of which add up to put elections at risk from coast to coast. Today, let’s talk about touchscreens. As the nation has absorbed the computer age – with laptops, smartphones and tablets virtually ubiquitous – the boards of bureaucrats that run our local elections have jumped at the chance to offer touchscreens as a voting option. Think...

Physical buttons are increasingly rare in modern cars. Most manufacturers are switching to touchscreens – which perform far worse in a test carried out by Vi Bilägare. The driver in the worst-performing car needs four times longer to perform simple tasks than in the best-performing car. The screens in modern cars keep getting bigger. Design teams at most car manufacturers love to ditch physical buttons and switches, although they are far superior safety-wise. That is the conclusion when Swedish car magazine Vi Bilägare performed a thurough test of the HMI system (Human-Machine Interface) in a total of twelve cars this...

It has been 143 days since the Curling v. Raffensperger case rested and Judge Totenberg estimated “about 30 days” to make her ruling. Is she going to wait until it is too late to do anything with the voting machines? My guess is YES, she will delay her ruling until it is too late to do anything. Judge Totenberg is looking like she has been influenced or corrupted by pressure from the state. I bet she retires before making her ruling.

Scientists Just Found Something Absolutely Shocking on These McDonald's Self-Order Touchscreens The discovery of fecal bacteria on McDonald's self-order touchscreens is raising concern about their safety. By Peter EconomyThe Leadership Guy @bizzwriter CREDIT: Getty Images Fast-food giant McDonald's has been rolling out touchscreen self-order kiosks in its restaurants for the past several years. While they make ordering your Big Mac, fries, and chocolate shake more efficient and accurate (and they're actually kind of fun), yesterday scientists revealed that they found something on those touchscreens that should be of tremendous concern for McDonald's customers. Bacteria. But not just any kind of...

UPDATED: November 4, 2014 2:22 p.m. LANHAM, Md. (WNEW) — Malfunctioning voting machines are causing issues for voters in several Virginia precincts, the Republican Party of Virginia says. RPV wrote a letter to the Virginia Department of Elections this morning stating there were problems with some of the electronic voting touch screens in at least four different Congressional Districts. “Voters have difficulty selecting the candidate of their choice using the touch screen because the screen’s touch sensor is not properly aligned with the text that appears on the screen,” a RPV spokesman said in the letter. A video link included...

The Democrat mantra that voting fraud is rare takes another blow today with the stunning story of a GOP candidate unable to vote for himself in Cook County Illinois. The Illinois Political Review reports: Admitting his confidence in Cook County ballot integrity is shaken, State Representative Candidate Jim Moynihan (R-56), was shocked today when he tried to cast a vote for himself and the voting machine cast it for his opponent instead. “While early voting at the Schaumburg Public Library today, I tried to cast a vote for myself and instead it cast the vote for my opponent,” said Moynihan....

However, Apple has been rumored to be working on a smartwatch device, and the patent suggests the so-called "iWatch," expected to arrive some time in 2014, might be equipped with a curved screen that would fit the shape of the user's wrist.

The research team of Antti Oulasvirta at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics has created a new keyboard called KALQ that enables faster thumb-typing on touchscreen devices. They used computational optimization techniques in conjunction with a model of thumb movement to search among millions of potential layouts before identifying one that yields superior performance. A user study confirmed that, after a short amount of practice, users could type 34% faster than they could with a QWERTY layout. Typing on today's mobile phones and tablets is needlessly slow. One limitation is that the QWERTY layout is ill-suited for tablets and other...

A Chicago voting-machine tech is sounding the alarm, claiming he witnessed multiple error messages on the voting touch-screens this election – but only in cases where people voted for Mitt Romney. Steve Pickrum said he worked for Chicago’s election system during the early voting and Election Day voting for the 2012 race. As an equipment manager for the system, Pickrum said, he responded whenever there was a glitch with a voting machine. “On early voting, when I did work on the floor when voters needed help using the equipment, I was able to see the preference of the voter, and...

Excerpt - Switching gears. Walt asks about Vista and the lousy reception it’s been given. Is Vista a failure? Ballmer: Vista is not a failure. Is it something we’d like to improve? Of course. Is it something that with 20/20 hindsight we’d do differently? Sure, he confesses. But Vista has sold a lot of copies, he adds. Walt jumps in and asks about the percentage of Vista sales that result in downgrades to XP. Ballmer dodges. Gates looking a little depressed. Walt asks if Vista has damaged with Windows brand. Gates says Microsoft’s philosophy is to “do things better.” And...

October 3, 2007 Sharp yesterday began publicly demonstrating a new technology that could have far reaching effects on the way we interact with the mounting tide of mobile information available to us through diminutive devices such as smart phones, PDAs, cameras and UMPCs – the marriage of sensing function with an LCD screen is not new, but Sharp’s technology puts an optical sensor into each pixel enabling the screen to become a multiple touch-point screen and a scanner. The technology is a simple one to understand, but one that has massive implications as it is a fundamental building block in...

"Other affected owners have taken their iPhones to local Apple stores, where after a brief inspection, Apple Store Geniuses have routinely recommended that the handsets be sent into Apple for a 3-day repair. Apple offers customers a $29 iPhone rental in the meantime, though one customer speaking directly with AppleInsider observed that he successfully negotiated a waiver of the fee during his repair process."

Live coverage at MacRumorsLive.com

Excerpt - Microsoft Corp. has taken the wraps off "Surface," a coffee-table shaped computer that responds to touch and to special bar codes attached to everyday objects. The machines, which Microsoft planned to debut Wednesday at a technology conference in Carlsbad, Calif., are set to arrive in November in T-Mobile USA stores and properties owned by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. and Harrah's Entertainment Inc. Surface is essentially a Windows Vista PC tucked inside a shiny black table base, topped with a 30-inch touchscreen in a clear acrylic frame. Five cameras that can sense nearby objects are mounted beneath...

TALLAHASSEE — Congressional hopeful Christine Jennings' drive for a new election in Southwest Florida suffered two blows Friday when Congress announced it would seat her opponent and a state judge denied her request to inspect vote-counting software in Sarasota County. But Jennings, a Democrat who has fought relentlessly since official results showed her losing by just 369 votes to Republican Vern Buchanan in last month's election, was unfazed. She pledged to appeal the judge's ruling and said she supported the seating of Buchanan "temporarily," in part because congressional leaders promised to remove him if she prevails in her call for...

Brief excerpt - go to the source for amazing video - While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. Such sensing devices are inherently also able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops. Since refining the FTIR (frustrated total internal reflection) sensing technique, we've been experimenting with a wide variety of application scenarios and interaction modalities that utilize multi-touch input information. These...

Researchers in academia are apparently starting to punch rather large holes in the Berkeley study (http://ucdata.berkeley.edu) that supposedly showed that something went amiss with e-voting in Florida that gave Bush 130,000+ extra votes. Here are some links for whoever is interested. Be warned some of it is pretty heavy reading. http://elections.gmu.edu/Berkeley.html http://www.stat.ucla.edu/~jasonl/vote_note.html http://newmarksdoor.typepad.com/mainblog/2004/11/still_more_on_t.html http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/11/more_on_the_ber.html http://alex.strashny.com/2004/11/electronic_voting_machines_florida_and_bush_votes_in_2004.html P.S. This is my first post so please be forgiving if I screwed up! :^)

Yesterday my day started at 0600 hours. In my role as 'inspector' of a local polling place, I had five clerks to supervise in setting up the five electronic touch screen units we were going to use, and prepare for a 0700 hours opening of the poll to voters. Each of the clerks had received a three hour training course from staff of Registrar of Voters office, to acquaint them with their function election day. I formally opened the polling place at 0700 hours. All went well, as voters were processed - each received a plastic card which would activate...

WEXLER, ET AL. v. LEPORE, ET AL. (October 26, 2004) The state of Florida will not be required to create a paper record from touch-screen voting machines. U.S. Representative Robert Wexler had argued that the touch-screen voting machines used in some Florida counties lacked a manual recount procedure. Memorandum Opinion [PDF] http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/voting/wexlervlepore20041025opn.pdf Final Judgment [PDF] http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/voting/wexlervlepore20041025fj.pdf Related Materials: FindLaw Legal News Special Coverage: Election 2004 http://news.lp.findlaw.com/legalnews/lit/election2004/index.html

IT WAS an affair with technology that began in the early part of the last century and lasted several blissful decades before ending in an ugly divorce.Now Americans have simply fallen out of love with their not-so-trusty old mechanical voting machines, which were widely blamed for the 2000 presidential election debacle in Florida. But as voters in the United States rush to embrace the wonders of touch-screen voting and other electronic improvements on the notorious butterfly ballots and hanging chads of four years ago, many believe the old system was not so bad. "If this is how it is starting,...