The Daily Kos reports a case of what you might call fuzzy electoral maths in Franklin County, Ohio.
Franklin County, OH: Gahanna 1-B Precinct
638 TOTAL BALLOTS CASTUS Senator:
Fingerhut (D) – 167 votes
Voinovich (R) – 300 votesUS President:
Kerry (D) – 260 votes
Bush (R) – 4,258 votes
Well, some people might consider that a little suspicious. As they might the matching story that another Ohio county refused to let journalists or the public observe the count in case they were terrorists. Or this:USA Today
“Officials said UniLect Corp., the maker of the county’s electronic voting system, told them that each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the limit was actually 3,005 votes.
Expecting the greater capacity, the county used only one unit during the early voting period. “If we had known, we would have had the units to handle the votes,” said Sue Verdon, secretary of the county election board. Officials said 3,005 early votes were stored, but 4,530 were lost.
Jack Gerbel, president and owner of Dublin, Calif.-based UniLect, said Thursday that the county’s elections board was given incorrect information. There is no way to retrieve the missing data, he said. “That is the situation and it’s definitely terrible,” he said.”
Dear God. Nothing, but nothing, in IT these days is cheaper than storage, and they make a voting machine that has a ceiling on how many ballots it can accept. I’ve always been dubious about the whole notion of electronic voting, basically because I don’t see what the real benefits are compared to the difficulties. I was astonished in 2000 to hear of these weird and Heath Robinsonesque mechanical voting devices of chad fame, being British and hence used to the three P’s – pencil, paper and public counting. Are we looking at the first great e-voting train crash?