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Down for the Count
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of PBS
Posted: November 11th, 2006
http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/236/index.html
New election machines, as mandated and funded by federal law, may create a new election debacle instead of correcting the old one. In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which allocated $3.6 billion for all 50 states to update their voting systems. Some industry analysts suggest that the government implemented the new technology too quickly to the detriment of not only security and performance of the new machines, but the integrity of our democratic process. Avi Rubin, a computer science professor at John Hopkins University...performed an analysis of voting machines produced by Diebold. But his recommendation that the machines not be used in elections fell on deaf ears. NOW traveled to Oakland County, Michigan on Primary Day, where election workers encountered more than a few frustrating snags, even when demonstrating the machines for us. In one instance, it took five attempts for the machine to accept a ballot. We also checked in on other states. What we found were alarming scenes of computer and human error, poor results validation, nonexistent contingency plans, and extreme vulnerability to tampering. In half of 37 primaries held this year, there were technical problems associated with the new HAVA-mandated technology. These included an extra 100,000 votes recorded but never cast in Texas, which was blamed on a programming error [and] ballot counting malfunctions in Iowa that declared losing candidates as winners.
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