Hi. After reading your article--A Stolen Election?--I am inclined to share my experience with you.
I witnessed my wife's attempts to vote for Kerry in precinct 1196, St. Edwards Church, Palm Beach FL 33480. She pushed Kerry at least 3 times, each time a Bush vote displayed.
anxiously called me over and I suggested that she not push so hard on the screen, and push DIRECTLY on the X for Kerry and it worked. The summary at end stated a Kerry vote. My machine gave no problems. We voted early, to go answer phones for the PB county Democratic HQ.
During my stint on PB Dems phones, I answered 2 calls from poll watchers, relating to VOTER COMPLAINTS: "I Push the Kerry button, and get a Bush vote." After the first one, I called the Kerry lawyer pool, and their response was "seems to be happening everywhere," "poll workers have a procedure to take offending machine off line, and re-calibrate it." the 2nd call, I relayed the information to "demand a re calibration."
After thinking about this problem (with 40 years of computer programming experience), I thought about how to debug a program, REQUIRING RECALIBRATION enough to make it a STANDARD PROCEDURE. Then the thought came to me that it may not be a BUG, but a "DESIGN FEATURE" as we euphemistically call some in the trade. This was a Sequoia machine, not a (Republican-run) Diebold. If your touch-screen routine was designed to properly execute when pushed lightly in the DESIGNATED SPOT, it would be certifiable. If it was pushed elsewhere or TOO HARD, what would the program do? Perhaps skew to a "preferred candidate"? Based on proximity to the DESIGNATED SPOT. Perhaps this was calculated on a pixel basis, and maybe the size of the finger/footprint. What happens when one pushes farther along the longer "Kerry" name versus the shorter "Bush" name? Is the touch-screen map parametrically hard-coded in pixel ranges, or with a (calculated, possibly volatile) bitmap, which could be modified by a bug in a clock routine? Or some other routine, unrelated to voting such as Windows scheduler, or the touch interrupt?
http://www.davidcorn.com/