Mother Jones Messes Up
Mother Jones magazine has an article called “Just Try Voting Here: 11 of America’s worst places to cast a ballot (or try)”. In the part called “Machine Meltdowns” they printed this error:
In Pottawattamie County, Iowa, machines suddenly began counting some candidates’ votes backward.
Now it is true that some voting machines are capable of counting backwards if the totals get high enough (over 32,000 votes, I think). But that is not what happened in our June primary in Pottawattamie County.
What really happened is that the machines didn’t know about ballot rotation. Rotation keeps the same candidate from being at the top of the list in every precinct. The machines were set up to read the top line and report the total for candidate A in every precinct even though candidate A was not actually in the top slot in all precincts.
This produced some eye-opening results and the machines were turned off before bedtime. Paper ballots were counted correctly the next day.
It’s a simple story. How could Mother Jones get it so wrong? Well, at least there is a paper trail, and they can correct their error.