State: Workers erred in testing

[SarasotaDem]

State elections officials concluded Thursday that human error caused discrepancies in a simulated election staged Tuesday, after viewing hours of videotapes of elections workers casting ballots.

Today, those same elections officials will begin the next stage of a three-week audit of Sarasota's touch-screen voting machines in an effort to determine what led to an 18,000 ballot undervote in the 13th Congressional District.


http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061201/NEWS/612010758




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Doesn't look good
They are starting to make excuses
Hope todays machine testing will prove them wrong.
This is what happens when the STATE does the testing... :(

[havocmom]

1. Ah, yes, we are supposed to trust the machines and not the humans.

But, didn't humans make, program, and SELL the machines?

Yes, making excuses seems to be the MO of the crooks and liars in power.

[lumberjack_jeff]

2. Human error = they voted for the candidate programmed to lose by the black box.

[gratuitous]

3. If trained elections workers can screw it up . . .

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that every last one of these "glitches" or "problems" or whatever is truly the result of user error, what chance do regular voters, who see these voting machines once every other year or so, have of getting satisfactory performance out of them?

Remember, we're not talking about a middle school math exam, where 80% might net you a B grade; we're talking about the votes of the electorate, and the goal is not 80% or even 85%. We want to see 100% of the votes registered and counted. These machines are junk.

[MGKrebs]

4. This doesn't explain much, really.

The test workers were given scripts to follow as to which votes to cast, and were apparently unable to follow the script, so the outcome didn't match the planned outcome. And the machines they used were not used in the election.

Also, in one place in the article it says " The first stage of the audit resulted in 10 discrepancies in the 251 ballots cast " but then later it says "In each of the five discrepancies" so who knows what's up with that.

Doesn't say much for the aptitude of the poll workers or perhaps more so their training.

10 discrepancies in 251 ballots? What's that, 4%? Seems like a high "human error" amount for what seems like should be a simple process.

I suppose one could say that following a script is similar to a voter going in pretty much knowing who they want to vote for, but then that doesn't say much for the whole electronic process if it is so hard to do that trained poll workers can't even cast correct ballots in a monitored test.

[SarasotaDem]

5. Only thing it proves

is that the ballot was at least so poorly designed that even a trained and scripted voter
couldn't always vote accurately.