I came across an article from the New York Times discussing the state of electronic voting. In short, it’s not good. The problem is that these voting machines are rigged with bugs, making them very unreliable. And, of course, everyone is blaming computers for that. What people don’t realise – or are not told – is that machines are just machines. They do what they are told to do. So, if the software does not work, it’s because it hasn’t been written / tested properly. Take this for example:

“In 2005, the state of California complained that the machines were crashing. In tests, Diebold determined that when voters tapped the final “cast vote” button, the machine would crash every few hundred ballots. They finally intuited the problem: their voting software runs on top of Windows CE, and if a voter accidentally dragged his finger downward while touching “cast vote” on the screen, Windows CE interpreted this as a “drag and drop” command. The programmers hadn’t anticipated that Windows CE would do this, so they hadn’t programmed a way for the machine to cope with it. The machine just crashed.”

This is a prime example of poorly developed software. This bug should have been caught during testing. Especially when you think that these machines can decide on the next President of the United State. Scary, isn’t it!