E-ballot device for presidential vote has bugs, report confirms

Found on CNet News on Sunday, 08 January 2012
Browse Politics

An e-voting machine that is to be used for the presidential election this year has been found to have "anomalies" such as failing to record votes or logging the wrong vote and freezing, according to a government report.

Specifically, the DS200 failed in some cases to record when the touch screen was calibrated or the system was powered on or off, failed to read votes correctly when a ballot was inserted at an angle, and accepted a voted ballot without recording the ballot on its internal counter and without recording the marks, according to the report.

Every time. Every single time there's something to vote for in the US, you read about how the voting machines fail to do the job correctly. Yet the officials don't throw them out. It's amazing that on one hand there's a space station successfully floating in the orbit, yet nobody seems to be able to build a simple machine that counts votes in a reliable and controllable way.