There will be a voting machine disaster in 2016 [View all]

[DetlefK]

Last edited Mon Sep 21, 2015, 10:15 AM - Edit history (1)

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/voting-machine-meltdown-2016-likely-investigation-warns

“The problem of aging and outdated voting equipment is national and widespread,” Brennan concluded in a wonky but stunning report that found most voting machines in use across America are older than the first i-phone. As Dana Chisnell, director of the Center for Civic Design and a visiting scientist at MIT noted, machines that were bought 10, 12, or 15 years ago “were designed and engineered in the 1990s.” Brennan’s experts said, “We ignore it at our collective peril. A majority of jurisdictions in 2016 will be using machines at or near the end of their projected lifespans.”

...

The problem is decrepit electronics can misrecord votes, lose votes en masse because of faulty memory, and be hacked at the tabulation stage by insiders who know it takes very little to swing close races.

...

Brennan said, “The jurisdictions looking to deploy new equipment represent approximately 40 million registered voters and their states total 387 of the 538 electoral votes.”

...

Brennan quoted Jack Cobb, the laboratory director at Pro V&V—a federally accredited testing lab—who “told us that a coating on the edge of the touch screen ‘slowly degrades’ the glue that holds the screen in place. As a result, the touch screen can slip out of place, and register votes incorrectly.

...

For years, jurisdictions using paper ballots that were scanned to be counted thought they had a better approach—because they had a paper trail that could be audited in recounts. Yet the report notes that aging optical-scan machines have their problems too. And other key computer parts—motherboards and memory—can also fail:




----------------------

You know what doesn't age and cannot be hacked? Pen&paper and humans.

Germany votes with paper-ballots and ballpoint-pens.
The ballots are counted by hand and any citizen is allowed to stay and witness the counting.
The election ends at 7 PM, the first precincts report at about 7.15 PM and the almost-final result is available for the evening-news at 8 PM (the results can still shift by 0.1% here and there, but it's practically a done deal).

---------------------

Could Obama use his executive powers as President to force everybody to switch to pen&paper?