"""Amanda Brown, a spokeswoman for Elections Systems & Software, the company that made the software, said the company thinks that the problem was a human error, not the software. "It's our belief right now it's related to a procedural error in operating the software," she said."""

So, then, Amanda, WHAT WAS THAT HUMAN ERROR? Can you elaborate???

WHAT WAS THAT HUMAN ERROR?

DUH !
Buying the machines in the first place WAS THE HUMAN ERROR

Have folks here seen this very recent post on Daniel Hopsicker's website about election fraud in Florida? To quote from the first part of the article:

Gary L.Greenhalgh, the election company executive responsible for the touch-screen electronic voting machines in Sarasota County which failed to register fully one of every seven votes cast in last week’s hotly-contested race to replace Rep. Katherine Harris, has a checkered past, the MadCowMorningNews has learned exclusively, including involvement in election bribery scandals.

The most recent rocked voters in North Carolina in 1999, and resulted in the supervisor of elections in North Carolina's Mecklenburg County being sent to federal prison for taking over $130,000 in payoffs from MicroVote, the election company where Greenhalgh was national sales director.

More recently, as vice president of Election Software & Services (ES&S), Greenhalgh was instrumental, first success of an all-out push in 2001 by then newly-elected Sarasota County election supervisor Kathy Dent to persuade Sarasota County to pay more than four million dollars for touch-screen electronic voting machines; and then as the project manager overseeing their installation.

Greenhalgh's Ivotronic machines allegedly failed to register over 18,000 votes in Sarasota County last week; his touch screen machines were almost entirely responsible for the massive 13% undercount of votes which marred the closest Congressional contest in the country, which pitted Republican Vern Buchanan against Democrat Christine Jennings.

Thus it is not incidental to discussion of the fairness of that contest that the curriculum vitae of one of its key players, the man who brought touch screen voting to the hometown of Katherine Harris, has been filled with textbook examples of American elections being conducted by people whose sheer brazen corruption equals that of any pack of Washington lobbyists sharing Jack Abramoff's Skybox at a Redskin game with the San Diego "defense contractor" buddies of convicted grifter Randy "Duke" Cunningham.

I think it should interest fellow frequenters of BradBlog.

"But wait. There's more.

In an ironic twist (in a story abounding with them), Greenhalgh was once quoted in the New York Times saying, “The problem with computer-assisted voting systems was that they centralized the opportunity for fraud.”

Greenhalgh's long service in the election industry, we have learned, stretches all the way back to one of the earliest election companies, Shoup Electronics, working for company founder Ransom Shoup, who was himself convicted of bribery and sent to federal prison in 1979."

No, it IS the software!

I have been an applications developer since 1972. ANY critical operational software that does NOT preclude human error is DEFECTIVE. THAT is why you cannot start your car in gear!

DUH!

Assuming that there is no chicanery any software that FAILS that test is DEFECTIVE. Any sotware company that does not recognize that basic fundamental principle is INCOMPETENT.

PERIOD!

Error was buying ESS in the first place. All e-voting machines must be dumped in favor of paper versions that can be recounted. All counting machines must be completely cut off from the web and must have known, inspectable components. Unreliable voting machines violate the Constitution. But in a nation of corporate corruption, like this, the first route to dumping such machines is their failure, the waste in having paid for dinosaur machines.

Carl Street: #5

If Diebold made cars in 2006, you could start them in gear, unless they were made for banks, of course!

Where, oh where, is Lou Dobbs? I just looked around, and he's gone. I'm sure we'll see him during the 2008 election saying in disbelief, "how could this have happened?" Prove me wrong Lou!

Election Systems & Software Continues Heritage of Innovation (SPOOF)

OMAHA, Neb., Nov. 22 /PRNewswire/ --- Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S), the world's leading provider of voting technology, sponsors a national competition to encourage new insights into voting system enhancements. The program, organized under the auspices of the University Voting Systems Competition (VOCOMP) brings together teams of the best minds in the country --- all focused on innovating new and exciting technologies.

Amanda Brown, a spokeswoman for ES&S, said today that ES&S is working with scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to provide vote counting through quantum computation, which provides a result to an election without ever running the vote counting algorithm.

By combining ES&S’s quantum computation counting algorithm and quantum interrogation, scientists at the University of Illinois have found an exotic way of determining an election result – without ever counting the votes!

Using an optical-based quantum computer, a research team led by physicist Saul Tu Kwick has presented the first demonstration of "counterfactual computation," inferring information about an answer, even though the computer did not run.

Quantum computers have the potential for solving certain types of problems much faster than classical computers. Speed and efficiency are gained because quantum bits can be placed in superpositions of one and zero, as opposed to classical bits, which are either one or zero. Moreover, the logic behind the coherent nature of quantum information processing often deviates from intuitive reasoning, leading to some surprising effects.

"It seems absolutely bizarre that counterfactual computation – using information that is counter to what must have actually happened – could find an answer without running the entire quantum vote counting computer," said Kwick, a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics at Illinois. "But the nature of quantum interrogation makes this amazing feat possible."

"In a sense, it is the possibility that the vote counting algorithm could run which prevents the vote counting algorithm from running," Kwick said. "That is at the heart of quantum interrogation schemes, and to my mind, quantum mechanics doesn't get any more mysterious than this."

Amanda Brown said test results at ES&S show that “this new technique of determining an election result without counting the votes makes substantially fewer errors than our previous attempts at actually trying to count the votes.”