Yet Another E-Voting Glitch; This One Adds 5,000 Phantom Votes

from the oops dept

Another election using e-voting machines... and another set of stories concerning massive problems. Slashdot points us to the news that a local election in Rapid City, South Dakota, was about to go to a runoff after no one hit the 50% mark, when someone finally noticed that the 10,488 vote total seemed a bit high. So, they went back and recounted the actual ballots, and discovered only 5,613 people voted, but the software added up the votes incorrectly. Once again, we're left wondering why it's so difficult to do simple arithmetic -- and why e-voting companies like ES&S are so against allowing experts to look at their source code and maybe help catch some of these bugs before they totally screw up an election.

ES&S, of course, has been especially bad when it comes to transparency, despite numerous stories of glitches. It's also the company that had an employee stop by here on Techdirt, call us all "idiots" while insisting that the machines were perfectly fine and that the machines are "extremely scrutinized and very reliable" and anyone questioning their reliability was simply relying on "conspiracy blogs." Of course, his focus was on the idea that the machines were "hacked" -- a charge we never made. Our concern -- and the concern of many others -- are that the machines are unreliable, prone to errors and have serious security and process flaws. Considering how many stories we've seen of problems with those machines in real elections, that seems to be proven fact -- not "conspiracy."

And yet, ES&S has always resisted any real scrutiny. When California looked to investigate e-voting machines more fully, ES&S was the one vendor who held out for months beyond the deadline, before finally submitting its source code along with a threatening letter about how it would personally sue the Secretary of State if any of its trade secrets got out. Of course, soon after this, we found out that even its certified code didn't much matter, since it had given California machines with uncertified code for an election. In the end, not surprisingly, ES&S machines were found to have significant problems, and were decertified in California. Perhaps South Dakota should have taken note.

Filed Under: e-voting, extra votes, south dakota, transparency
Companies: es&s