Question:
Please Summarize this for Government class..?
In 2004, a touch-screen voting machine in Beaufort, North Carolina, erased 4,439 ballots cast during early voting two weeks before Election Day; they were never recovered. A similar problem in Burke County, North Carolina, resulted in several thousand votes for president not being counted. And, according to the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a voting machine in Ohio managed to add 4,000 extra votes for Bush. But those episodes, voting experts say, are just a preview of balloting debacles to come: The federal Help America Vote Act requires most counties to replace punch-card or lever machines with newer technology by the end of this year, and election officials are scrambling to meet the deadline. Already during this spring’s primaries, reports of trouble multiplied: Initial results in Fort Worth, Texas, showed 150,000 votes being tabulated in a county where only about 50,000 people voted. In Pottawattamie County, Iowa, machines suddenly began counting some candidates’ votes backward. In Philadelphia, more than 5 percent of voting machines broke down on primary day.
The most sensational claims about voting technology have to do with the possibility of actually programming the machines to manipulate elections; computer scientists have warned that viruses could, for example, be inserted into vote-counting programs to delete a set number of votes and then erase themselves. So far no smoking guns have been found to prove such vote-fixing. But there have been myriad well-documented instances of human error and machine failures, and of extreme reluctance on the part of machine manufacturers to make their software accessible to outside experts. “Elections in this country are becoming proprietary,” explains Lillie Coney, coordinator of the D.C.-based National Committee for Voting Integrity. “Vendors are saying, ‘You can’t investigate our technology, or our software.’ They’ve put the technology in place, but the mechanisms for public officials to manage the technology, they’re just not there.”
When Ion Sancho, the elections supervisor in Leon County, Florida, discovered last year that Diebold’s machines could easily be tinkered with, the company responded by refusing to service or upgrade the county’s voting equipment so long as Sancho remained in charge. Since then, researchers in Florida and California have discovered more problems with Diebold technology, finding that the machines could accidentally allow one person to cast multiple votes, could be tricked into terminating an election count before all the votes had been tallied, and could permit changes to election results without detection.
Even some of the “paper trail” systems for electronic voting are deeply flawed. On some machines, logs have been designed so badly that auditors are at risk of counting “tentative” votes instead of the voters’ final choices; on others, a voter wanting to check whether her choice has registered must lift an inconspicuous door and then peer, through a plastic screen, at a tiny printout, with the actual vote often not even scrolling into view.
Best answer:
Answer by Will
electronic vote machines are vulnerable to being tampered with
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April 25, 2012
Categories: Discussions
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Tags: happen, Must, this
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