Imagine the election official's dismay when after scrupulously completing the EAC's guidelines, convinced he/she has done everything possible to run a clean election, then by late morning the machines heat up and start flipping votes.
As in Holt, the EAC does not offer guidelines on what to do when the machines fail. It does mention that state laws govern the circumstances that trigger a recount, including: candidate initiated, voter initiated, closeness of an election (results are within a specified vote margin requiring an automatic recount), and automatic (required by law regardless of vote margin). However there is no mention of machine errors or circumstances that could and should require a re-vote.
The Voluntary Voting System Guidelines to the EAC was developed by the Commission's Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) with technical support from the National Institute of Standards and Technology state officials in running elections fairly. Still, a couple of interesting observations. (NIST). This document is to be used by voting system manufacturers and voting system test labs, so there is no expectation for guidelines to test the equipment adequately.
First when an error is discovered during testing, "the manufacturer attests that the change will be incorporated into all existing and future production units. We can't know what happened behind the manufacturers' closed doors. However there is long-lasting irrefutable proof that manufacturers absolutely did not incorporate corrective changes into thousands of touchscreen systems that continue flipping votes. (Section 2.5.5-G Resumption after deficiency.) More is required here to ensure our elections are protected against vendors saturating the voting public with defective products.
Secondly, "Inasmuch as the following behaviors would almost certainly preclude a demonstration of the correctness of the logic, logic verification will almost certainly involve a demonstration that they cannot occur. . . (4.6 Logic Verification.) (;-)
We hold elections in this country to empower Americans to vote their choice, and to ensure their voices are heard and their votes are counted. Not to build independent technological empires. Not to keep unscrupulous vendors in the business of pushing defective voting machines on a trusting public. Not for anointing leaders with laws that ignore the people's choice when an election fails.
Time to look, listen and regroup. It's not the ballots. It's the machines.
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