In her October 10th article announcing Florida’s move to optical scanners, Miami Herald’s Amy Sherman reported, “To save time and money, most counties that already had equipment from Election Systems & Software ordered from the same company.” Last August after Florida and California’s testing exposed problems and vulnerabilities with electronic voting machines, Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning asked if the amount of time spent in defending the voting system or trying to prove to the public that the voting systems are accurate and secure is worth the effort. He said we should be spending our time running good elections.
There, problem defined. You can’t run a good election if your machines don’t work. If our vendors and election officials invested the time and dollars upfront following good-business practices, we wouldn’t be facing another questionable election. The problem isn’t that our voting machines are flawed. The real problem is that they didn’t find the failures before the machines were purchased, before implementation, before they misplaced our votes….The real problem is that after the machines spew out erroneous results, election officials and the courts get to decide the people’s choice. Of course with the new ballot scanners, yet another independent vote counting computer, we might never know. Problem solved.
Lani Massey Brown, MARGIN OF ERROR: BALLOTS OF STRAW. When Florida’s governor infiltrates America’s voting machines, only one woman can stop him - one woman and the man sent to spy on her.
BALLOTS OF STRAW is honored to be featured on VotersUnite.Org, a non-partisan national grassroots resource for fair and accurate elections.
