E-voting on Super Tuesday: did it work or not?

[DuctapeFatwa]

The answer to that question depends on whether you're reading the AP or News.com. First, from an AP story...Scattered technical problems were reported...One Maryland polling place had to switch to paper ballots Tuesday because its new electronic voting machines didn't work. State elections supervisor Linda Lamone said technicians expected to have the problem fixed quickly.

And now from News.com's Declan McCullagh's story titled "E-voting Smooth on Super Tuesday" and filed at 5:05pm:..."We had no equipment failures at all," Linda Lamone, Maryland's elections administrator, said in an interview Tuesday afternoon. "We have everything in place to know almost immediately whether something's happening."

So which is it, Ms. Lamone? Did Maryland have technical problems with the Diebold machines or not? I'd love to know when those two quotes were gathered, because the only way she comes off as not being a liar is if McCullagh's quote was gathered earlier than the AP quote (and presumably before the malfunction happened), even though McCullagh filed his story much later in the day. This is unlikely, though, given that the AP story was filed around 11am and McCullagh says his interview with Lamone took place "Tuesday afternoon." So either the AP writer is mistaken or Linda Lamone is not telling the whole story.

I should also point out that McCullagh did a shoddy job on his story. The AP reporter was able to round up quite a few instances of e-voting problems that McCullagh either didn't know about or deliberately left out. (I prefer to give McCullagh the benefit of the doubt here, and to think that he didn't know about the other incidents. He's usually a good reporter.) Most of McCullagh's story consists of boosterish quotes from representatives of e-voting companies, with some references to News.com reporting on previous concerns about e-voting. Not to get all preachy or anything, but this is a really important story, and if there's one area where the press is supposed to be at its most aggressively skeptical, it's on a story like this that concerns the machinery of democracy. So maybe next time News.com can give us more real reporting and less PR.

http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/1078290591.html

[whistle]

1. Do not let the media elect the next president......

and don't let E-voting rob us of another election. We would be much safer if the United Nations were brought in to monitor the voting all across the country in November.

[Kelvin Mace]

2. Welcome to DU, Whistle...

But I would prefer Jimmy Carter as an election monitor. It would be fund to watch the neocons have a stroke. <s>

David Allen
Publisher, CEO, Janitor
Plan Nine Publishing
http://www.plan9.org

[JohnOneillsMemory]

3. We had a pack of bbv failures in San Diego and Alameda County, CA.

According to reports on KQED National Public Radio. Again, as usual, the problems were described as 'volunteers not knowing how to turn them on properly' and improper power supplies. Supposedly, some polling sites were down for a few hours and paper ballots did some back-up but not all.

I heard someone interviewed who was critical of bbv say that better training and getting the bugs out is the excuse every time for several elections and it never gets any better.

(Welcome, Whistle, on this auspicious evening of efforts to oust the usurper! I think that line about the UN is a good one to alert Americans who don't know about the perils of bbv.)