Electronic+Voting+Machines

__ Electronic Voting Machines __ History: Counting votes has always had problems, hanging chads, and recounts are common ones. In an effort to reduce counting issues direct recording electronic AKA (DRE) devices have been implemented. Some people are scared of hackers messing things up; others think human error is a bigger problem. Pros:  -  They are fully accessible to the disabled, including the visually impaired, while maintaining privacy. Examples: audio voting and handheld voting devices.  -  DRE’s make it impossible to over vote or inadvertently make more than one choice in a race.  -  Better for language minorities, with the possibility of an unlimited number of different language ballots.  -   Cons:  -  Vulnerabilities in source code, possibility of hacking and vote manipulation.  -  Problems with transmission of vote counts, a hacker could possibly intercept a count and then transmit fraudulent results. <span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; color: black;"> -  <span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; color: black;">Inability to conduct an independent recount, there are no hard copies of individual votes, there is no way to check if the vote cast by the voter is the same as the vote in the DRE systems memory. <span style="font-size: 16.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; color: black;">Malfunctions: Among the incidents reported on are the following: <span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; color: black;"> -  <span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; color: black;">
 * In the March California primary, a machine part failed causing 1,038 polling places in San Diego County to open late; counting software in San Diego gave several thousand of John Kerry's votes to Dick Gephardt, who already had dropped out of the Democratic presidential contest. In Orange County, poll workers gave thousands of voters the wrong electronic ballots, allowing them to vote where they did not live. [|10]   In Alameda County, 186 of the 763 encoders used to program the "smart cards" failed.  [|11]   As a result of problems such as these, many Californians called for a ban on electronic voting in the November election.
 * In a special election in Florida, 134 people who used the touch-screen system did not have a vote recorded in an election that was decided by twelve votes [|12]
 * There were numerous problems in a November 2003 election in Virginia. According to // PC World // magazine, "When polls closed at 7 P.M., many of the county's 223 precincts tried to transmit their results to the election center at once, tying up the line for hours. Many precinct judges gave up and drove their tallies to headquarters. A software problem delayed some results for 21 hours. Voters claimed that some of the booth machines crashed and had deleted some votes before their eyes. Election officials repaired ten broken machines off-site, with vote data inside, and then returned them to service a violation of state law."  [|13]
 * In Muscogee County, Georgia, in 2003, touch-screen machines registered "yes" when voters voted no. When notified of the irregularity, polling workers advised voters to cast the opposite of their intended vote, the NAACP reported.  [|14]
 * In Montgomery County, Maryland, during the 2004 primary, an unknown number of votes were cast on touch-screen machines manufactured by Diebold Inc. that presented the wrong candidate when the font was magnified. [|15]