FROM MOTHER JONES MAGAZINE - WAKE UP CALL FOLKS!
This November, 25 percent of voters will cast ballots on digital voting machines that won't leave a verifiable paper trail. Paperless voting machines are in use in four battleground states that account for 71 of the 270 electoral votes it takes to win.
What happens when paperless voting machines fail? Best case: Election results are delayed by a few hours or days. Worst case: The machine over- or undercounts votes, and there's no way to verify the tally. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, such failures have caused the miscount or loss of anywhere from a few dozen to tens of thousands of votes in nine states. In 2006, the touch-screen iVotronic system in Florida's Sarasota County recorded 13 percent of the 140,000 votes cast as blanks.
Who makes the machines? HAVA's passage precipitated a "feeding frenzy" in the voting machine industry, according to Douglas Jones, a computer science professor and the co-author* of Broken Ballots, a new book on voting technology. In 2002, there were about a half-dozen major voting system vendors. Today there are two, Election Systems & Software and Dominion Voting Systems, which together control an estimated 70 to 90 percent of the market. (Diebold's voting machine unit, once synonymous with doubts about digital voting, is now part of Dominion.)
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This November, 25 percent of voters will cast ballots on digital voting machines that won't leave a verifiable paper trail. Paperless voting machines are in use in four battleground states that account for 71 of the 270 electoral votes it takes to win.
What happens when paperless voting machines fail? Best case: Election results are delayed by a few hours or days. Worst case: The machine over- or undercounts votes, and there's no way to verify the tally. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, such failures have caused the miscount or loss of anywhere from a few dozen to tens of thousands of votes in nine states. In 2006, the touch-screen iVotronic system in Florida's Sarasota County recorded 13 percent of the 140,000 votes cast as blanks.
Who makes the machines? HAVA's passage precipitated a "feeding frenzy" in the voting machine industry, according to Douglas Jones, a computer science professor and the co-author* of Broken Ballots, a new book on voting technology. In 2002, there were about a half-dozen major voting system vendors. Today there are two, Election Systems & Software and Dominion Voting Systems, which together control an estimated 70 to 90 percent of the market. (Diebold's voting machine unit, once synonymous with doubts about digital voting, is now part of Dominion.)
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