Update: According to stories in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, and an AP story here in Business Week, elections administrator Linda H. Lamone is satisfied with the new software for the electronic poll books. Nevertheless, according to the Baltimore Sun, the Governor Ehrlich is not convinced:
The Ehrlich administration said yesterday that it was not satisfied that the check-in machines would function as intended. Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. has been an outspoken critic of the electronic machines, and his policy and legislative director Joseph M. Getty said Diebold has a history of broken promises.
“We know they work in a controlled setting,” Getty said. “But will it work when election judges set it up and when they’re in a school somewhere with all of the vagaries of Election Day stress?”
In all this fuss over making the things not crash, is anyone worrying about proper operation of the machines when they are not crashing? Where is the audit of these last-minute software changes?
Mocoprogressive has also been covering this.
In an article in yesterday’s Baltimore Sun, we learn that
The e-poll books are supposed to be operated by tapping a small plastic stylus against the computer screens. The terminals are linked together and are used to register, among other things, whether a voter has shown up at the polls.
But during last month’s primary election, on occasion, one machine in a precinct would show voters as having cast ballots, while another would say they had not come to the polls.
To fix the problem, Diebold officials said yesterday the units could be operated with computer mouses and that they could provide the state with 5,500 of them in time for the general election. Or they could install new software and allow election judges to touch the screens.
During yesterday’s test inside the Marriott’s banquet hall, the mouses were in use. But one poll worker did not heed the warning to operate the equipment using only the mouse, causing the machine to lose contact with the five others it was linked to. It took less than 30 seconds to reboot the machine.
Oh, this is going to work well.
I’ve written about the Diebold problems before. The Washington Post and the Washington Times also have stories about the recent tests.