Monday, November 03, 2008

Hi-Tech Voting a Thing of the Past?

Touchscreen voting has been run through the wringer over the past 8 years of election cycles and it's not getting any better. For people who aren't techies at heart or at work, it must be frustrating to find 


In states with early voting, there have been scattered reports of touch-screen machine malfunctions, ballot misprints causing scanners to jam and vote-flipping, in which the vote cast for one candidate is recorded for another.

Florida has switched to its third ballot system in the past three election cycles, and glitches associated with the transition have caused confusion at early voting sites, election officials said. The state went back to using scanned paper ballots this year after touch-screen machines in Sarasota County failed to record any choice for 18,000 voters in a fiercely contested House race in 2006.

Voters in Colorado, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia have reported using touch-screen machines that at least initially registered their choice for the wrong candidate or party.

"I pushed the Democrat ticket, and it jumped to the Republican ticket for president of the United States," said Calvin Thomas, 81, an Obama supporter who tried to vote early in Ripley, W.Va. "I’m a registered Republican, and I’ve voted in every presidential election since 1948. I don’t like seeing my vote do something I didn’t tell it to do. I take that real serious."

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