144000 votes, 19000 registered voters

November 11, 2003 4:19 AM

In Lebanon, 144000 e-votes casted by 19000 registered voters. No need to blame Middle East crisis, try Lebanon , Boone County, Indiana. Diebold is no longer alone.
posted by elpapacito (15 comments total)

And people who was seeking for more updates on e-voting problems and Diebold may like to give a look at this site which is the continuation of Why-War page on Diebold with updated news.
posted by elpapacito at 4:21 AM on November 11, 2003

is it _really_ that hard to print old-skool paper ballots, giving people a big fat pencil and letting them vote like that?
posted by matteo at 4:31 AM on November 11, 2003

Did all the dead people vote in alphabetical order as many times as necessary -- kinda like Bexar County, Texas?
posted by alumshubby at 4:32 AM on November 11, 2003

Please, "cast," not "casted."
posted by jpburns at 5:12 AM on November 11, 2003

Here is an idea: "It OBVIOUSLY doesn't work; stop using it at least until it does". What is wrong with that approach again?

/ And please, mr. manufacturer, do not try to *fix* it.
posted by magullo at 5:16 AM on November 11, 2003

Please — em-dash where appropriate! ;-)

Grammarfilter.
posted by shepd at 5:27 AM on November 11, 2003

A good article on the subject in Sunday's NYT: Machine Politics in the Digital Age [reg req], about Wally "committed to delivering votes to the president" O'Dell, Diebold's CEO.
posted by cbrody at 5:28 AM on November 11, 2003

I'll bet half of them read 'Nice site!' and linked to www.viagra-for-u.com.
posted by rory at 5:45 AM on November 11, 2003

The important question here is whether County Clerk Lisa Garofolo is related to Janeane.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:47 AM on November 11, 2003

shepd: the en-dash use (space en-dash space) is also considered appropriate for a break in thought, altho' this may be more common in the UK than the US. Believe me, I've had long conversations with my proofreader about this and what she says goes 'round here ;-)
posted by i_cola at 7:01 AM on November 11, 2003

That just ain't right.

Well, that depends on your point of view, doesn't it? You're thinking like a voter. Try thinking like a politician who wants to get elected without the bother and expense of actually convincing a majority of voters. See how the rightness quotient magically changes?
posted by languagehat at 7:47 AM on November 11, 2003

During a sleepless Sunday Night, I watched a rerun of a 4-year-old "Dilbert" cartoon on Comedy Central that went beyond the show's sometimes-on-target satire to being absolutely prescient on this very issue. Eerie.
(Show title: "Ethics". It'll be aired again Thursday Night/Friday Morning at 2:30AM EST/PST on America's Comedy Central channel. Fire up your TiVos.)
posted by wendell at 8:50 AM on November 11, 2003

My dns server won't seem to resolve the indystar domain (Or yahoo for some reason...), does anyone have a cache or text file of the article?
posted by dejah420 at 9:34 AM on November 11, 2003

It was a pretty brief report, dejah420———here are the key paragraphs:

Boone County officials are searching for an answer to the computer glitch that spewed out impossible numbers and interrupted an otherwise uneventful election process Tuesday....

A lengthy collaboration between the county's information technology director and advisers from the MicroVote software producer fixed the problem. But before that, computer readings of stored voting machine data showed far more votes than registered voters.

"It was like 144,000 votes cast," said Garofolo, whose corrected accounting showed just 5,352 ballots from a pool of fewer than 19,000 registered voters.
posted by rory at 9:49 AM on November 11, 2003

Unlike the Diebold touch-screen systems, these machines do provide a printed audit trail so even though there was a glitch in the computer reporting, it was correctable. (I'm an Indiana resident and we use the same equipment in our county. I was also fairly involved with our municipal election a week ago.) Not exactly the same as Diebold's "we don't need no stinkin' printers" attitude.
posted by AstroGuy at 10:30 AM on November 11, 2003