Dan Gillmor is ranting about computerized voting machines again. This time, the issue is that a few voters cast ballots in the wrong precincts, and the voting machine vendor couldn't invalidate the ballots because of steps taken to insure voter privacy.
The vendor and the Orange Country registrar are waving this problem away, because the final vote tally was lopsided enough that invalidating a few votes is meaningless.
Dan thinks this is an indictment of voting machines.
I don't buy it. This is how a vote is supposed to work. Voting in an election like this must be an anonymous act. If it is possible to invalidate an individual's vote for any reason whatsoever, that premise of anonymity is broken, as are the vote produced from that election.
The true issue here is that running the polls is an error-prone business. If a voter was presented with an incorrect ballot, the error is most likely the fault of the election judges, or possibly the county registrar. The real problem with computerized voting is that there is no guarantee that the vote is being tallied properly. This particular is not a "computer error", but a "human error" -- someone presented some voters with the wrong ballots on election day. This kind of mistake could have been made just as easily with punched cards, paper slips, or mechanical voting machines.
If people (like Dan Gillmor) are going to hold computerized voting machines responsible for every gaff, irregularity, and corrupt election judge, then the fight is already over, and the opponents to voting machines have already lost. The problem with voting machines is accountability of the machines to work fairly and impartially, not the accountability of the people who manage the process.
