Can anyone explain this full article?

[AnIndependentTexan]

I know it is early voting and it was the first day of voting that they had problems in Florida.

http://www.stpetetimes.com/2004/10/19/Decision2004/Voters_abide_waits__g.shtml

Voters abide waits, glitches
Dozens walk away rather than wait for technicians to solve computer conundrums. Still, thousands turn out.
By DAVID KARP and JEFF TESTERMAN
Published October 19, 2004

[skids]

1. It's like when your cable modem goes out.

Usually everyone on the block is affected because it isn't your modem that is broken, but equipment used by the cable company.

The article explains that they had a bunch of laptops all networked together through the Internet, which they were using to share the lists of voters, so they could prevent people from voting twice at two different locations, using provisionals (not totally sure of FL provisional rules but that would make the most sense.)

What happened is that a peice of equipment ("router") that was a critical component of their little corner of the Internet took a little dirt nap. This could have been because the hardware smoked, or the software crashed, or it was DoS attacked. They didn't give any details about that. Usually routers are in a closet somewhere in a building that technicians have to walk or drive to to fix it, and when there is a hardware failure you have to replace the router which can take some time. Usually also in the case of a library-run network like this, they don't have technical staff in the building 24/7.

Routers do stay up for a long time and then fail occasionally, they do have an annoying habit of failing right when a customer is trying to do something important. Sometimes this is because they have been left on during a period of very low usage, and bugs in the software have caused a memory leak, which doesn't do any harm until the traffic picks up and the router needs to use more memory, and finds out all its memory has been leaked away. In this case, a simple reboot of the router will get the leaked memory back.

[ClintCooper2003]

2. I wonder about those "technicians"

Maybe those "technicians" were people who came in and fiddled with the votes. What does anyone else think?