Vote of confidence?

[sled]

Vote of confidence?

http://www.courierpress.com/ecp/news/article/0,1626,ECP_734_3334233,00.html

Officials wonder if election audit will answer all questions

By MAUREEN HAYDEN Courier & Press staff writer
November 17, 2004

What if Vanderburgh County's new touch-screen voting machines are like
the VCR you got for Christmas a few years ago?

You pull it out of the box, plug it in, try to figure out how to
program it, and then when you can't follow the directions, you curse
and holler, "Stupid machine!" Or what if the machines are like that
lemon of a car you once bought - a pricey but unreliable heap, sold to
you by a dealer who keeps insisting he can't find anything wrong.
That's the dilemma Vanderburgh County officials find themselves in as
they venture into the complicated territory of electronic voting. On
Tuesday, the first of two audits of the Nov. 2 election results got
under way, when the company that has a five-year, $2.9 million lease
to provide electronic voting machines to Vanderburgh County voters
launched a self-assessment of how its equipment worked Election Day.

The results aren't expected until Friday, when officials with the
Omaha, Neb.-based company, Election Systems & Software Inc., plan to
meet with county officials for a "debriefing." But some county
officials wonder whether Election Systems & Software's self-review
will be able to answer this question: Were the problems that occurred
during the Nov. 2 election - which included crashing computers, up to
three-hour voting lines and reports of machines gone haywire - because
of human error or machine malfunction? Or both? Vanderburgh County
Clerk Marsha Abell is leaning on the side of human error, and faults
in large part the more than 280 poll workers who failed to show up for
training on how to use the machines. But she isn't ruling out computer
error, which is why she spent much of Tuesday watching Election
Systems & Software officials begin their review of each and every one
of the county's 550 touch-screen machines. Election Systems & Software
officials estimated it would take until Friday to complete the audit
and gather data, including vote tallies, from each machine.

[Supersedeas]

1. Is democracy headed in the right direction, when election officials have

to be privately 'debriefed'?