Word: problem
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...there was a problem. The woman had not made any choices at all. She had only browsed. Now when she told the election judges she was ready to do it again--but this time actually vote--they told her it was too late. Pressing the last button, they said, is like dropping your ballot in an old-fashioned ballot box. There's no getting it back...
Perhaps the biggest fallacy in this debate is the notion that elections were perfect before Congress decided to hold them on computers. They weren't. "Stuffing the ballot box" is not an expression from the world of fiction. The problem with overvoting punch cards existed for decades before the dateline PALM BEACH COUNTY became a household term. Peoria County clerk JoAnn Thomas says she routinely tossed out several hundred twice-punched ballots every year. That represents roughly 1% of all registered voters in her jurisdiction...
...scrutiny of polling practices intensified. So just as America has moved to a process of electronic voting and tabulation intended to make voting more accessible, reliable and secure, trust in the system has actually gone down. Says David Orr, clerk of Illinois' Cook County: "We used to have a problem with giving people the wrong ballots. And if we were lucky, we'd catch it before they voted. Now, if the same thing happens with a touch screen, it's a conspiracy...
...least, Murphy's Law has been a bigger problem than fraud. Many jurisdictions, especially those with long or bilingual ballots, have struggled to program their computers perfectly, and there have been scattered reports of glitches. In three Virginia cities, for example, electronic voting machines have inadvertently shortened the name of the Democratic candidate in one of the tightest Senate races in the nation. In Charlottesville, Falls Church and Alexandria, James H. Webb's name will appear on the ballot summary screen page simply as "James H. 'Jim'"--with no last name. Sounds like a crisis--except that the same thing...
...recorder race she was monitoring in June. She noticed that a 20-year incumbent was being beaten 10 to 1 by an unknown newcomer. Sensing a glitch, Drake cross-checked the electronic results against the totals on the paper vote and discovered the veteran was actually well ahead. The problem, it turned out, was the way the candidates' names had been ordered and coded into the access cards that activated the machines, which were made by Omaha's ES & S. Drake says she should have caught the problem in the pre-election test runs. "It was human error both...