ABC News: Could Super Tuesday Be Super Chaos?

[flpoljunkie]

Could Super Tuesday Be Super Chaos?



Report: Six States, Including N.Y. and N.J., at 'High Risk' for Vote Machine Malfunctions
By MARCUS BARAM

Feb. 5, 2008 —

It's been more than seven long years since the Florida recount that upended the 2000 presidential election, with its mangled punch cards, "hanging chads" and other tabulation problems.

Since then, dozens of states have spent millions of dollars to purchase electronic voting machines and to put in places ways to verify votes. But was all that money worth it?

Problems have persisted in almost every federal election since 2000. Just two weeks ago, Republican primary voters in Horry County, S.C., were turned away from some precincts where paperless electronic machines weren't working.

As voters head to the polls today to participate in the most crowded primary day in history, with the most delegates at stake and a tightening Democratic contest, some are concerned that there could be chaos at the polling booths with malfunctioning machines and disputed results.

Six states, including New York, New Jersey, Georgia, Arkansas, Delaware and Tennessee, are "considered at high risk for having election results affected by machine malfunction or tampering," according to a report by Common Cause and the Verified Voting Foundation, nonprofit groups committed to accountable politics.

Those states made the list because they don't have safeguards in place such as requiring machines to produce paper ballots or records and requiring random postelection audits of the machines, according to the voting foundation's president, Pamela Smith.

"If a situation arises where there is a question about the results, what do you do?" said Smith. "The states that we've listed at high risk  the voting systems may work, it may not work. But there's no way to prove it's accurate. Things can and do go wrong."

Smith says that many states and counties rushed to buy electronic voting machines without regarding the need for a way to verify votes if the machine malfunctioned.

"What happened was people moved too quickly to all electronic and didn't realize that they had to have a way to check for accuracy," she said.

[renate]

1. I don't get it

It is absolutely beyond me how this could be discussed in broad daylight without becoming the biggest scandal in the history of the United States, the greatest (supposed) democracy in the world.

Americans have suffered and died for the right to vote. Our government is based on the premise, anyway, that it's of the people, by the people, for the people.

Basically, this story and stories like it are informing the public that the democracy that Americans wave the flag for and put their hands over their hearts for and go to war for is a huge sham. And the silent acceptance from most of the voting public is deafening.