Yet another touch-screen voting machine broke down, in yet another “hotly contested” election, in yet another Democratic-leaning district yesterday. Due to the failure, the actual results are completely unknown, unreliable, and unverifiable, and yet, one candidate (the Republican, as coincidence would have it) has been named the “winner” by 89-votes out of 12,000 cast in the Fairfax County, VA, Board of Supervisors special election.
We are as completely sick of writing these stories by now, as we’re sure you are of reading about them, so we’ll bury the details below the fold, for those who want the skinny on what happened…You’re welcome…
The culprit machine, here, is the WINVote DRE touch-screen made by Advanced Voting Solutions, a company that recently went out of business after hundreds of failures were found in its systems, and the company refused to correct them.
Nonetheless, the geniuses who run Fairfax County’s election decided to use only touch-screen systems in the election yesterday, despite having used both paper ballots and touch-screens in last November’s election. The WINVote “is the most widely used touch-screen voting machine in Virginia,” according to the Washington Post story in which explanations are given for why the Republican “narrowly defeated” the Democrat by 89 votes.
Officials are “not yet sure what caused the device to malfunction.”
WaPo’s earlier story — when the Republican John Cook was said to have been leading the entirely-unverifiable election by 69 votes, before the wholly-unverified and unverifiable “votes” from the failed machine were printed out, one-by-one, and then tallied by officials from the machines memory — notes that the race came down to the votes cast in the single precinct where the machine failed.
Last November, that same precinct, they report, “supported President Obama with about 57 percent of the vote.” The Democratic candidate Ilryong Moon also outspent Cook, and was endorsed by the chairman of the board in the district which is said to be Democratic-leaning.
If he takes the seat — as it appears he will, since there is no way to verify any of the ballots as having been counted accurately — Cook would be just the third Republican member on the 10 member Board of Supervisors.
News Channel 8’s coverage offered a few more details on the actual machine failure (they call it a “snafu”, naturally), in addition to a couple more maddening points:
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About 20 minutes after the polls closed, Scruggs check the machine and realized the number didn’t add up. Election officials came to the site and sealed the machine. “We couldn’t get results from the machines. The numbers weren’t adding up to what they should be, so we had to make sure the poll book was correct and then get the results from the correct machine and then move forward,” said general registrar Rokey Suleman.
After running reports on both machines, the officials found the faulty machine recorded an accurate number of votes, but there was a problem with the final tabulation. Workers printed out every vote recorded on the machine and hand tallied each one.
Of course, there is no way to know that any of those “printed out” votes actually reflect the voters’ intent, anymore than it can be known that any vote tabulated in the race is actually what the voters had intended.
And then there’s this graf, which reminds us that apparently, the bad guys and their disinformation continues to win the PR battle out there in the world. Of course, those same bad guys had about $3.9 billion tax-payer dollars to spread their message, so it’s unlikely a blog that begs for $10 and $20 donations could defeat them entirely. Here’s the maddening graf:
Dear Julie: It’s not good. It sucks. It’s unreliable. And it’s a cold sharp knife into the very heart, and hope, of democracy.
Dear Richard: Paper elections are cheaper, more accurate, and take no more “time” to tally than touch-screen elections. And at the end of the day, it’s possible to know who actually won them.
Apparently, our work here is never done…
The most maddening thing to me is that paper ballots were absolutely satisfactory for 100’s of years, now all of the sudden the powers that be insist we switch to a method that has proven itself to be vulnerable to election fixing and inaccuracy.
Why? Because of the money involved! Touch screens all had to be purchased and somebody made a lot of money, and they simply don’t give a damn if it is accurate or not. All they want is the money. It is the new American way.
So the point of the story is that if the TOTAL button on a calculator doesn’t work, it is likely that none of the numbers entered are acturate. Sounds to me that the backup system, “print every single vote if the machine fails to print the total”, worked perfectly. Our volunteer elections officiers deserve our thanks for a good well done.
I see you don’t have any concern about this Brad:
http://jta.org/news/article/2009/03/11/1003607/freeman-blames-israel-lobby-for-withdrawal
What a surprise. I thought you cared about peace man.
Its not just those two machines. Just like they trust the memory on those machines, they trust the memory on all the other ones too.
Yes Virginia! No Ballots, No Problems.
“Fairfax Voter”, an apparent believer in fully faith-based elections said:
No, the point of the story is that nobody in Fairfax has any idea who won that election, since not a single vote was verifiably recorded accurately, as per the voters intent.
To make matters worse, in a race reported by the machines to be this close, a single failed machine, for which nobody can explain why it failed, is being trusted to offer legitimate numbers that decided the race.
That’s not democracy. That’s corporatized failure masquerading as democracy, and folks like you are shortsighted enough (or partisan enough) to not give a damn that you’ve kissed self-government goodbye in the process.
It printed something. But where is your evidence that any of those “every single vote[s]” were actually recorded as per the voters intent? Got any such evidence? For even ONE of those votes?
Didn’t think so.
Yes, they do. Your election officials, however, or board of supervisors, or whoever decided to use unverifiable voting systems instead of democracy, deserve no thanks. They deserve jail time for undermining the will of the people.
I’m seeing this all over the place, Brad.. Americans can’t think beyond deciding what color they want their iPod to be. This nation is doomed because the vast majority can’t be bothered to actually _think_ about things, and can’t be bothered to _demand_ answers.
I’m about to have a very long and drawn out battle with my daughter over this same issue.. I don’t want my child to walk away from using her brain simply because it’s easier to let other people tell you what to think, yet her mother (we have split placement and a host of issues to deal with) asks “who ever said thinking and knowing things was better?”.
The ability of the American Pubilc to think and reason and use logic has successfully been destroyed by that “magic box” they watch every night. Cars, TV, Computers, All magic.. and since the car gets them to the mall most of the time, and the TV brings them their American Idol and infomercials all the time, and computers get them their porn and internets all the time, surely all machines work “as they think they should”.. but the concept of “rigged game” and “broken machine” and “glitch” don’t ring with these people, because it’s “all magic”.
Ignorance is bliss.. and oppressed.
.
Amazingly, if those who run the State of Virginia had just bothered to check that quaint old Virginia Constitution, they would have known that it prohibits counting votes in secret, and they would have been able to conduct a recount to make sure that the voters chose who won instead of some programmer or hacker.
To find out more about Virginia’s election law, see Virginia’s Elections Are UNCONSTITUTIONAL?!?!