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One of the things I hate about not having the Left of the Middle archives available is that many of my posts from 2003 and 2004 are coming back to haunt us. One of the themes that I had was the myriad of problems with electronic voting machines leading up to and including the 2004 elections. I even had a separate category for these posts as they began to multiply.

Some of the problems had to do with the companies themselves. Diebold was a favorite target as their CEO promised to deliver Ohio to President Bush even as his company was installing voting machines with no audit capabilities. The state became the focus post-election and Ohio do go for Bush and installed him back in the White House. They also liked to install updates to their software without telling states (or going through audit procedures) in the days leading up to Election Day.

ElectionLine has been at the forefront of these and other problems (malfunctions, calculation errors) and is a nonpartisan site. The NY Times has a fantastic article about them and the problems that they found with the 2006 election.

Basically, it comes to do the fact that we’ve spent $4 billion on machines and we have no idea if they work. There is no verifiable audit trail on any of these machines. Votes are lost or miscounted (Arkansas tabulated the votes three times in one county and the total shifted by more than 30,000 each time). Sarasota County Florida may have had 18,000 votes disappear in a Congressional race. And other states ran out of paper ballots when the electronic ones malfunctioned.

Colorado was even worse. As many as 20,000 voters simply gave up trying to vote after their new electronic voter database failed miserably.

In Denver, the culprit was a new electronic poll book, which workers had to consult through laptop computers. The system was supposed to verify each voter’s name in less than a minute. But it started slowing at 7 a.m. and eventually had to be turned off and rebooted, after taking up to 20 minutes to find each name.

As a result, voters waited in line for two to three hours. Liz Prescott, a computer industry executive, said she twice tried to vote but was deterred by the lines. “I’m just flabbergasted that this system at all levels failed,” Ms. Prescott said.

John Gaydeski, Denver’s election director, acknowledged that the system had not been tested properly before the election.

They didn’t even properly test the system that was required for people to vote? Oy vey!

We need to update voting systems, but to me this sounds like the space pen issue. In Canada, you get a piece of paper and mark an X next to the candidate you want to vote for. The results are available just as fast, if not faster, than they are in the US. And they haven’t spent $4 billion (and counting).