Miscalibrated voting machines in North Carolina…
Several early voters have called into WFMY News 2 with concerns about a voting machine glitch.
All callers reported that they touched their finger to the screen for the person/party they wanted to vote for, but the wrong person/party was marked.
One person reported trying to check the McCain/Palin ticket, but Obama/Biden was highlighted.
Another person reported the exact opposite. They tried to check the Obama/Biden ticket and McCain/Palin was highlighted.
George Gilbert, the director of the Guilford County Board of Elections says, “If the machine was out of calibration, it could do that and that’s when the precinct officials need to stop, and put them on another machine or go back and try again.”
Fortunately – in these cases alert voters caught the mistake before walking away. If you live someplace where they use touchscreen voting equipment, ask to see if you can vote on a paper ballot. If not, be sure to check the voter-verifiable paper trail. Do not automatically assume that these machines will count your vote as intended.
And I don’t say that because I think there’s some vast conspiracy to steal votes (yet). I say it because the machines are POS’s that shouldn’t be allowed to count the quarters in your kid’s piggy bank much less help determine who will be president next year…
Maybe us New Englanders are just dumb, or atavistic, or whatever. Our “fill in the bubble” Scantron ballots are dead-simple to vote and leave an audit trail to boot. Even better (snark at the E-voting supporters), tabulating the votes after the polls close takes about 30 seconds and that’s only because the printer in the ballot box/tabulator is a slow dot-matrix job.
Allowing an election to happen without an audit trail is just plain wrong and I believe that Amendment XVIII should be enacted to require all US voting systems to generate a hard-copy auditable record of each and every ballot.
Oops, let’s go for Amendment XXVIII. Damn Roman numerals.