By Jo Best, 10 March 2004 11:15
NEWS Getting voters to the polls on a normal day isn't easy. But with the advent of e-voting in Orange County, California in elections last week, it looks like that's all changed. With the new electronic terminals, turnout was far higher than expected - more than 100 per cent in some districts.
Compared to the local average of about 37 per cent, it's an impressive figure - but it won't be bringing a smile to the faces of the Orange County officials.
According to the LA Times, it's human error, not technology, that's responsible. The e-voting system uses codes to assign a voter to a particular precinct. Some election workers had been mistakenly assigning voters to the wrong precinct - resulting in the higher than expected number of ballots in 21 voting precincts.
Some precincts also experienced an unnaturally low turnout - possibly because their votes had been counted in other districts.
It's unlikely that the votes will be recast or recounted following the polling foul-up. Apparently the winners' margins are wide enough to factor in the erroneous voting and still come up with the same results.
About 7,000 voters were affected by the e-voting problems, said the LA Times, but it's impossible to find out their names, due to the protections that are put in place to guarantee voters' anonymity.
Comments
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1. Fickler
How can you have more than 100% turnout, did you mean do say "more than 100% increase"?
2. Paul Shrimpton
Reminds me of the story of the elections in Liberia many years back, when the incumbent President won with a majority of 600,000. Even though Liberia only had 15,000 registered voters at the time. A government spokesperson expressed confusion as to why foreign observers "would find this different from any other democratic election".....
3. anonymous
This is dangerously enough for somebody to "steal" an election (kinda like the 2000 presidential election...)
What I don't understand is how the developers behind all of this couldn't setup the system to automatically assign the voters to their districts using their address??? A little bit of good creative coding could fix this issue...
I thought these things were supposed to remove human error, not just shift it from the voters to the elections staff... =P
Although with all of the security flaws found in these "certified" electronic voting terminals, I have zero faith in this new system.