Pre-Election Diebold Failure in Florida...

Diebold's Optical-Scan System FAILS in Sarasota, FL
County election director Kathy Dent's 'solution' as bad or worse than the actual problem...as usual...

The November 3rd Election Day is nearing, so naturally the words "glitch," "hiccup," "snafu," and "snag" are back in the headlines, instead of the word "failure," which would be the appropriate one to use in such cases.

Today, it's our old friends in Sarasota, under the continuing and now-legendarily failed direction of Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent and her latest failed voting system, this one an optical-scan system made by Diebold, featured in the Charlotte Sun's "Scanning glitch in vote machine test":


The machine that didn't work --- no, it's not a "glitch," it didn't succeed in carrying out the purpose for which it was designed and purchased anymore than a car which didn't start, or whose brakes failed could be said to have a "glitch" --- was the old, failed Diebold Accuvote optical-scan system, similarly used in hundreds and hundreds of counties in dozens and dozens of other states.

The "solution" Dent ultimately settled on in response to the failure of the machines made by Diebold (now calling themselves Premier and recently purchased by their larger competitor ES&S) is as bad, and as offensive, as the original failure itself...

FULL STORY: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7472

Aren't they supposed to wait til election day so as to really screw up democracy?

;-)

You are supposed to use the pen provided (a black pen) to fill it in.

Opti-scan works fine and it is human countable if necessary without using any machines whatsoever.

They are not, of course. And if folks use their own pens (since previously, other colors apparently worked fine), or someone swaps the pens to cause trouble, or any other number of issues at the polls, you're cool with those votes being lost potentially?

As to op-scan "works fine", you know that how, exactly? And exactly under what conditions would we know when it's "necessary" for hand-counting? You'll let us know when that's the case? Or we'll rely on the initial Diebold count to be accurate enough? (If you read the original post, there's a link to the final scene from HBO's "Hacking Democracy" in which a paper-ballot, op-scan election is flipped such that the results would not have triggered a recount, so there would be no way to know the election results were flipped.)

the votes in bold print on the ballot..just saying.

And more than likely the result of the election wouldn't change.

We've been trying to get rid of her for ages. I've seen her described as "the new Katharine Harris," with good reason.

I think a big part of the problem is that Sarasota is a very wealthy community in general, but is also a college town and at least formerly, a haven for us old "hippie" types (until it got too expensive to live there and they forced the boat people out of the bayfront). That means we've got a lot of enthusiasm for progressive issues, but the big money really calls the shots. The fact that the area went blue last election was a huge victory, but problems like Dent remain.

They can probably give us the same fucked up and rigged results for far cheaper.

And it made them crash.

:rofl: