Electronic voting-machine jams, breakdowns, and glitches were strewn across the Election Night landscape, creating long lines when machines simply broke down. In at least one case, a viral YouTube video purported to show a Pennsylvania machine “flipping” a vote cast for President Obama into a vote for Mitt Romney. Vote flipping occurs when an e-voting touch-screen machine is not properly calibrated, so that a vote for Romney or Obama is flipped to the other candidate. While the Pennsylvania glitch was reported and the machine reportedly taken out of service and quickly recalibrated, other flipping was reported by news media accounts in Nevada, Texas, North Carolina, and Ohio.
While flipping and other machine problems have been more prominently reported in recent elections, it’s still too early to tell just how significant a role e-voting machine glitches may have played in the 2012 presidential election outcome, machine experts say. An early Monitor analysis shows that four swing states – Pennsylvania, Virginia, Colorado, and Florida – rely to varying degrees on paperless machines.
Early reports by a team of 5,000 lawyers and 3,000 grassroots poll watchers from the nonprofit machine-watchdog group Verified Voting documented scores of cases of e-voting machine glitches. Many of the problems occurred in Virginia, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Colorado, states that still use Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) machines – touch-screen voting equipment that lack any paper backup for later recount.
Multiple reports of calibration problems with e-voting machines – the type of problem that results in vote flipping – occurred in Virginia, Nevada, Texas, North Carolina, and Ohio, says Pamela Smith, executive director of Verified Voting, a Carlsbad, Calif.-based e-voting machine watchdog group. Many more reports, however, involved too few machines at polling places, malfunctioning equipment, and “ballot presentation errors” in which poor programming resulted in electronic screen presentations of the ballot that cause voter errors.
“What we’ve seen in 2012 is a real throwback to the kinds of reports from some jurisdictions that we’ve gotten for previous elections,” Ms. Smith says. “What’s pretty surprising is the volume of calls we’ve received reporting problems. What isn’t surprising is that a lot of those calls are about broken equipment – which when it gets so old you just kind of expect not to work.”
Indeed, Smith and other experts have seen this before. More than 1,800 voting machine problems were reported to election protection hotlines during the 2008 general election, according to Verified Voting. Such election failures mattered far less in 2008 because Barack Obama won by a landslide. But this year, the loser might be likely to demand a recount if the winning margin is small.
Full Article: Voting-machine glitches: How bad was it on Election Day around the country? – CSMonitor.com.