Voting Machines

The State Journal-Register today has an article that seeks to boost voter confidence in the new voting system. For some reason, the article failed to address or explain the software problems they reported after the March primary.

They include a quote from Ron Michaelson, a consultant hired by the county, claiming the system is invulnerable to hackers. I find that statement to be rather naive. It's exactly what the makers of Diebold machines claimed before University researchers proved otherwise. Just because the voting machines can't be hacked in individual precincts, doesn't mean that there can’t be errors when the votes are tallied.

Hackers attempting to steal an election are not the only concern we should have. It is entirely possible for the voting machine software to inaccurately tally the votes because of an unintentional programming error.

During the primary, the vote totals reported online at the County Clerk website gave some strange results. For example, Clearlake precinct 1 listed "-1" people voting at the end of Election Day on the county website, yet vote totals for individual races were there. Clearlake 7 listed 14 Democratic primary voters at the top of the page, yet claimed that 23 Democrats voted for Blagojevich and 19 for Eisendrath. Those totals remained for at least a few days, but have since been corrected. Considering those errors, why should anyone believe the entire system is full-proof?

I think the voting system we have is a good one and I have no reason to believe that anyone is attempting voter fraud. However, we're wasting the advantage of having paper ballots if we don't use them for a hand count audit of the election.

The County Clerk should do a hand recount of randomly chosen precincts to ensure the totals match those tallied by the voting machine system. That is the only way to have a complete guarantee that the totals are accurate.