Iowa Voters

New Yorkers are slowly losing the last fight in the nation against “computerized vote-switching devices.”

Don’t you love that term? I first heard it from a couple of longtime activists .

In this eloquent post New York engineer Howard Stanislevic explains that we could use the term ‘voting machines’ for the old lever machines, but it’s better to call the new gadgets either Von Neumann machines (stored-program computers), or merely ‘vote-switching machines’ if we want to emphasize their risks. And he’s not talking about touch screens which have been chased out of Iowa. He’s talking about the stuff we still use right here in River City.

It seems they had a Pottawattamie moment in NY earlier this year. The scanner was programmed wrong so that votes for one guy were seen as the same as votes for another guy. Election officials are supposed to test their gadgets and find these errors. New York did so and found the error. But they ignored it, misreading their own test results. After the election they realized the returns could not be accurate. Too Late.

As Howard says, “Eternal vigilance would be easy compared to what will be required of us” now that we have to guard against computerized elections being miscounted out of our sight.