Poll failures put results of future ballots in doubt | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle
Poll failures put results of future ballots in doubt | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle
Problems not addressed
Voting experts say it is impossible to know how many votes were not counted that should have been. But in Florida alone, the discrepancies reported across Sarasota County and three others amount to more than 60,000 votes. In Colorado, as many as 20,000 people gave up trying to vote, election officials say, as new online systems for verifying voter registrations crashed repeatedly.And in Arkansas, election officials tallied votes three times in one county, and each time the number of ballots cast changed by more than 30,000.
With no paper trails this will only get worse. This is a mess.
“If the success of an election is to be measured according to whether each voter’s voice is heard, then we would have to conclude that this past election was not entirely a success,” said Doug Chapin, director of Electionline.org, a nonpartisan election group that plans to release a report Wednesday with a state-by-state assessment of voting. “In places where the margin of victory was bigger than the margin of error, we looked away from the problems, but in 2008 we might not have that luxury.”
We need some real changes very quickly and if enough of us don’t demand it there is no way it is going to happen.
Filed under: 2006 general election, Elections Administrator, election, electronic voting, vote, voting methods
