Jay Bee Two

Paul Krugman has an article about electronic voting glitches in this year’s midterm elections, and this is a story that I hadn’t heard anything about yet. The evidence sounds pretty convincing that the voting software had some serious flaws, and most likely elected the wrong candidate. They did a recount, but of course, that’s pretty useless when you’re using buggy electronic voting machines that don’t produce a paper trail.

The problem is that the official vote count isn’t credible. In much of the 13th District, the voting pattern looks normal. But in Sarasota County, which used touch-screen voting machines made by Election Systems and Software, almost 18,000 voters — nearly 15 percent of those who cast ballots using the machines — supposedly failed to vote for either candidate in the hotly contested Congressional race. That compares with undervote rates ranging from 2.2 to 5.3 percent in neighboring counties.

Reporting by The Herald-Tribune of Sarasota, which interviewed hundreds of voters who called the paper to report problems at the polls, strongly suggests that the huge apparent undervote was caused by bugs in the ES&S software.

About a third of those interviewed by the paper reported that they couldn’t even find the Congressional race on the screen. This could conceivably have been the result of bad ballot design, but many of them insisted that they looked hard for the race. Moreover, more than 60 percent of those interviewed by The Herald-Tribune reported that they did cast a vote in the Congressional race — but that this vote didn’t show up on the ballot summary page they were shown at the end of the voting process.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard computer security experts up in arms over the state of electronic voting, and their complaints and criticism of the process has been going on for many years now. But states keep rushing head-first into buggy voting systems like this, and the citizens of the country don’t seem to care.

I’ve always had a hard time figuring out the difference between America invading another country because their supposedly democratic elections were obviously rigged, and all of the apparent election rigging that you can see in America.

For what it’s worth, Avi Rubin has a defense of Krugman’s take on one of the security experts that’s looking into the Florida race, Alec Yasinsac. Apparently Alec is strongly Republican, but Rubin says that he’s trustworthy and would be impartial. Avi Rubin has always been one of the people calling for reasonable fixes to electronic voting, so I’ll probably go ahead and trust this Mr. Yasinsac. Not that my trust matters, it’s only voting. What the citizens want doesn’t really figure into that.