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E-voting glitch roundup: 5 states with biggest probs

Xeni Jardin at 7:45 am Wed, Nov 8, 2006

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There were scattered reports of tech problems with e-voting machines all over the place, but the biggest documented problems occurred in:
- Montana
- Indiana
- Ohio
- New Jersey
- Colorado
...according to this article by BoingBoing reader Debra D'Agostino, who writes for CIO Insight Magazine: Link. See also this previous BoingBoing post: Link. Here's a related piece: "Was there e-Voting Fraud?" Link.

Reader comment: Joe says,

To clarify: to the best of my knowledge the problems in Colorado were not problems with the voting machines themselves. (Though as others have pointed out, there's no way te be sure there weren't problems with them also.)

Denver and Adams County both use an electronic system to verify a voter's identity and determine which ballot they should get. (This system is not state wide, as reported in the link; it's county by county.) This has the advantage of eliminating poll books--meaning a voter can go to any polling location and vote for all their local issues. But when the systems go down under the strain, as they did yesterday, no one can vote anywhere in the county. It wasn't an issue with the actual voting machines, however.

Jefferson County, where I was working on the Congressional campaign, had some machines that weren't properly set up the start of the day, but I believe that was resolved. While we did have some long lines towards the end of the day in some precincts, that seems to have more to do with how the voting machines were distributed than with using them.

There were also rumors of problems in Douglas County, but I haven't heard yet what caused them, or even if there actually were any.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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