'NYT' Sunday Preview: Scary Report on Faulty Voting Machines for This Year's Election

Coming between the Iowa and New Hampshire tallies, this Sunday's cover of The New York Times Magazine ought to strike a chord. It shows a man inside an exploding voting booth with a WARNING label over it and the words: "Your vote may be lost, destroyed, miscounted, wrongly attributed or hacked."

The massive Clive Thompson article, titled "The Bugs in the Machines," is quite chilling. "After the 2000 election," it opens, "counties around the country rushed to buy new computerized voting machines. But it turns out that these machines may cause problems worse than hanging chads. Is America ready for another contested election?"

One key passage: "The earliest critiques of digital voting booths came from the fringe -- disgruntled citizens and scared-senseless computer geeks -- but the fears have now risen to the highest levels of government."

One expert says that "about 10 percent" of the devices fail in each election.

The piece focuses on the newly popular "touch-screen" machines, noting that "in hundrds of instances, the result has been precisely the opposite" of the intention to add "clarity" to results: "they fail unpredictably, and in extremely strange ways; voters report that their choices 'flip' from one candidate to another before their eyes; machines crash or begin to count backward; votes simply vanish. (In the 80-person town of Waldenburgh, Ark., touch-screen machines tallied zero votes for one mayor candidate in 2006--even though he's pretty sure he voted for himself.)"

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003692052

Wow - and how long have we been discussing this on DU? Took 'em long enough to awaken from their slumber!

to go after this YEARS ago.

So now, when Democrats are poised to sweep, NOW they are raising questions about our election systems?

DANGER, WILL ROBINSON.

Time and again, their so-called "failures" falsely tilt results
toward candidates with an (R) after their name.

I am glad it's finally getting out there - this is a major thing we need to address immediately.