Saturday, August 14, 2004

An embarrassing snafu with an electronic voting machine surfaces during a demonstration for California officials. Voting activists say it proves the point about why the machines need a paper trail. By Kim Zetter. [Wired News] First the bad news, the continued denial by voting machine companies that defects happen often and are hard to catch: Sequoia spokesman Alfie Charles said the problem was not a programming error but a ballot-design error. "It was our fault for not proofing the Spanish language ballot before demonstrating it," Charles said. "We had a demo ballot that we designed in a hurry that didn't include all of the files that we needed to have the machine present all of the voter's selections on the screen and the printed ballots. That would never happen in an election environment because of all the proofing that election officials do." It is a programming error that the software did not catch the misconfigured ballot. Relying only on proofing by election officials is foolish, especially since the defect seems to involve complex interactions between multiple files. Now the good news: Charles agreed the paper trail worked exactly as it was supposed to work. "If this happened in an election, the first voter would see it and could call a pollworker. They would take the machine out of service if they saw a problem," he said. And finally, the really bad news: Ironically, just one week after the demonstration occurred, California took one step back from making sure voters in the state will have the reassurance that a paper trail provides. On Thursday, a Senate bill that would require a voter-verified paper trail on all electronic voting machines in the state by January 2006 suffered a setback when the Assembly Appropriations Committee, where the bill resided, decided not to push the bill forward during this legislative session, which ends Aug. 31. This means legislators will have to reintroduce a new bill next January when they reconvene. The political system, like the legal system (maybe not surprisingly since so many politicians are lawyers) is failing to adapt to an increasingly complex technological network in which the consequences of traditional interest-based decision making are very difficult to predict or manage. 9:34:11 AM