In other words: A discussion of The Bush Administration
Voteless in Miami
I'm not in a New York state of mind, but rather in that national disgrace otherwise known as the banana republic of Florida:
The group [Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition] is concerned about the machines' effectiveness, following revelations about other problems with the system. Last month, state officials said the touchscreen systems used by 11 counties had a bug that would make a manual recount impossible. Earlier this month, a newspaper study indicated touchscreen machines did not perform as well as those that scanned paper ballots.
Also Tuesday, election reform groups asked a judge to strike down a state rule preventing counties that use the machines from conducting manual recounts from them.
The Division of Elections then ruled that state law only requires a recount to determine voters' intent, and that it is impossible to question voter intent with touchscreen ballots.
Let me get this right: By Florida law, you can only recount a vote to determine a voter's intent, so the way to avoid what happened in 2000 is to install touchscreen voting machines, on which it is impossible to question voter intent. Makes sense to me. The Florida Division of Elections thus has ensured that in 11 counties recounting votes is both impossible and illegal. That's not what we meant by "fixing the system." But let's try continuing to vote:
The records disappeared after two computer system crashes last year, county elections officials said, leaving no audit trail for the 2002 gubernatorial primary. A citizens group uncovered the loss this month after requesting all audit data from that election.
The news of the lost data comes two months after Miami-Dade elections officials acknowledged a malfunction in the audit logs of touch-screen machines. The elections office first noticed the problem in spring 2003, but did not publicly discuss it until this past May.
The company that makes Miami-Dade's machines, Election Systems and Software of Omaha, Neb., has provided corrective software to all nine Florida counties that use its machines. One flaw occurred when the machines' batteries ran low and an error in the program that reported the problem caused corruption in the machine's event log, said Douglas W. Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa whom Miami-Dade County hired to help solve the problem.
So in other words, Miami-Dade County -- a name that will live in infamy -- had to hire a university science professor to find out that the fucking batteries were running out, and that as much as 8 percent of the vote had vanished into thin air as a result, in a gubernatorial election where the Republican won by only 4,794 votes. But wait, there's more:
And because a new state rule prohibits manual recounts in counties that use touch-screen voting machines except in the event of a natural disaster, there would likely be no use for the data anyway.
State officials have said that they created the rule because under state law, the only reason for a manual recount is to determine "voter intent" in close races when, for example, a voter appears to choose two presidential candidates or none.
Touch-screen machines, officials say, are programmed not to record two votes, and if no vote is recorded, they say, it means the voter did not cast one.
But The Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, in a recent analysis of the March presidential primary, reported that voters in counties using touch-screen machines were six times as likely to record no vote as were voters in counties using optical-scan machines, which read markings on paper ballots.
Got that? Six times as likely to record no vote. Somebody doesn't want somebody in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties' votes to register. Could it be all those Jews who voted for Pat Buchanan in 2000?
Is it me, or does the State of Florida suck?
- Michael 10:07 AM - [PermaLink] -
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