Even the Blind Woman Saw It
You would have to be blind not to see that the Automark voting machine needs more work. Actually, it was a blind woman named Penelope who first saw it in Des Moines Monday. Or at least she discovered it. The people looking over her shoulder really did see it.
Penelope had come to the meeting of the Iowa Board of Examiners of Voting Machines to test the device being examined. It marks ballots for people who need help. It helps them while keeping their votes private. It enabled Penelope to use headphones to hear the ballot read to her and provided her with a button to push to mark her choices in every race on the ballot.
No one knows what Penelope did to upset the machine. She did not know anything was wrong because the machine gave her the marked ballot at the end of her testing. But the machine had also locked up and put an error message on the screen. There was no audio error message, Penelope said.
I was sitting where I could not see the screen. But we were all told that an “argument out of range exception error” had occurred. No one knew what that meant. The machine’s advocates called headquarters to find out. They reported that this had occurred before in Illinois’s testing, and a repair to the software was already being written in Omaha.
Not to worry. Penelope was happy. She said she would cease voting absentee and actually go to the polls in the future. She said it was “about time” provisions were being made for blind voters.
The board of examiners decided the machine could stand to be rebooted if this happened on election day. They focused on the fact that no damage had been done to Penelope’s ballot. They certified the machine. Several Iowa counties are planning to use it.
But I contacted John Washburn, a software tester with a decade of experience. He said such an error “is usually indicative of bad code being passed to an interpreter of some sort.”
Bad code? Already detected in testing in Illinois? If this stuff gets past the extensive federal testing we always hear about, how extensive can it be?
We are indeed lucky to have this problem appear on the device that marks paper ballots. But this same company has also sold computer voting terminals (with NO PAPER TRAIL) to seven Iowa counties. Did they use any bad code in those machines? Was Penelope present the day those machines were tested? Penelope—-HELP US!