Electronic voting machine problems in VA

The WINvote electronic voting machines - made by Advanced Voting Solutions of Frisco, TX - wound up causing some difficulties for Fairfax County, VA. Apparently, 9 of the machines developed technical glitches, and when rebooting the machines at the election site failed to solve the problem, the machines were taken to a centralized location, fixed, and brought back to be used for the rest of the election.

The new machines, meant to simplify voting, made the tallying of the votes more problematic, with more than half of precinct officials resorting to the old-fashioned telephone to call in their numbers or even driving the results to headquarters, elections officials said. A handful of precincts resorted to paper ballots.

Election officials said it was the slowest performance in memory for counting votes on election night in the county. The problem came when precinct workers tried to electronically send results from the 953 new machines to election headquarters, unexpectedly overloading computer servers.

When the electronic system of sending results over telephone modems failed, precinct workers tried to call in the results but were met with busy signals. Many decided it would be quicker to drive.

Some voters also complained about using the new machines, and officials said that resulted in slow going at some polling places during the day. For example, a line of 100 people snaked around the polling room at Sleepy Hollow Elementary School Tuesday morning, workers said.

Fairfax election officials expressed surprise at the glitches.

"I don't know what the holdup is," Margaret K. Luca (D), secretary of the county's three-person elections board, said late Tuesday night. "I thought we had it covered. We tested all week in the county."

Personally, I can't think of too many situations in which it should be considered appropriate to take a voting machine out of the voting booth after voting has already started, take it to an off-site location, have someone tinker around with it, and then return it to the voting booth to be used again.

At least one candidate - Mychele Brickner, a Republican - has filed a suit to set aside votes from the machines in question until a judge can decide if the votes were recorded correctly or not. In addition, Christopher Craig, the attorney for the Republicans, notes that legally, machines should not be removed from a polling place and then returned for further use.

I've noted before that I believe that the security and effectiveness of electronic voting machines is something that should be of concern to all voters, not a partisan issue. In this case, it's a Republican who may have been hurt by the problems with the machine (though the reports indicate that they don't think the total number of votes in question would change the outcome), and I sincerely hope that she is able to get some kind of relief though her suit, though without a paper trail, I don't really know how that will work.

In this situation, there doesn't seem to be any reason to suspect actual fraud, but that just highlights another danger of these machines. Even if no one tampers with them, these machines are, at their heart, computers - pretty much like the ones we use everyday. They may work well most of the time, but they don't work all the time, and if one does break, there's no permanent record that can be used to verify that no damage has been done.

Posted by thorswitch at November 5, 2003 02:30 AM | TrackBack