I’m an election judge for the upcoming general election. I went to training yesterday morning. We set up a polling place in exactly the same way we will on Election Day, ran through some sample voters and tried to handle the problems we ran into. It was pretty clear that all of us knew what to do if someone tried to campaign within the polling place or tried to vote twice. But not too many of the judges were really sure how to handle any technical issues that came up.
In my county, we use Diebold machines — purchased before Diebold …read more

On Sunday, the New York Times ran a massive article covering the issues with electronic voting machines. The online version stretches over 10 pages, so let me provide a short summary before starting in on my response.
Electronic voting machines routinely have problems with the following:

server crashes
software interactions (most run custom software on top of a version of Windows)
printer jams
missing memory cards
touch screen flaws (these range from whether a past voters greasy fingers interfered with your vote to the mysterious ‘drag and drop’ problem in which a certain way of touching the screen causes the machine to crash)
reliability of printouts (they …read more

As of December 17, Mike Coffman, the head honcho of Colorado elections — his business cards say ‘Secretary of State’ — has decertified the electronic voting machines used in the majority of the state, citing a very long list of security concerns. This comes on the heels of Ohio’s Secretary of State releasing a study noting that Ohio’s electronic voting systems have “critical security failures.”
Coffman has declared the fallibility of electronic voting, but the responses of the various county election boards, as well as the county clerks responsible for overseeing elections.
In an interview with Denver’s Channel 7 News, Denver Clerk …read more