E-Voting: Wait, It Gets Better

Category: Hot Off The Presses

Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Apparently Fairfax County isn't the only jurisdiction that's been having trouble with implementing electronic voting -- officials in Boone County, Indiana, got a bit of a shock in last week's elections when their shiny new e-voting systems from MicroVote reported approximately 144,000 votes cast from a pool of fewer than 19,000 registered voters.

"I about had a heart attack," County Clerk Lisa Garofolo said of the breakdown that came as an eager crowd watched computer-generated vote totals being projected onto a wall of the County Courthouse rotunda.

"I'm assuming the glitch was in the software."

A lengthy collaboration between the county's information technology director and advisers from the MicroVote software producer fixed the problem. But before that, computer readings of stored voting machine data showed far more votes than registered voters.

"It was like 144,000 votes cast," said Garofolo, whose corrected accounting showed just 5,352 ballots from a pool of fewer than 19,000 registered voters.

"Believe me, there was nobody more shook up than I was."

Oh, I believe it, Lisa!

Here's the big question: is anybody else out there as nervous as I am about the idea of new vote tallies being produced based on undescribed collaborations between a county IT director and a vendor of voting machines? Is there any audit trail to verify this new count? How was it arrived at? Has it been independently verified by a third party? What's to have prevented them from introducing their own biases into the count?