Primaries Night
Posted: February 5th, 2008, 10:11 pm
Tonight Illinois is tabulating the votes from our primary elections. I worked all day today helping different precincts around Peoria use their electronic voting machines and trying to solve any problems they may have been having.
Afterwards, in the election commission headquarters, they were calculating the votes, which are stored on what appear to be PCMCIA cards that stored information in each electronic voting machine. All the votes were being read by proprietary software on a Dell PC. The Dell kept crashing, almost after every card was read (if at all) and the official had to unplug the reader and switch USB ports every time, then clicking through some driver error messages and wizards and restarting the tabulation software and doing this and doing that. It seemed like a constant, endless process.
I thought it was pretty unsettling that our votes are being tallied like this.
Afterwards, in the election commission headquarters, they were calculating the votes, which are stored on what appear to be PCMCIA cards that stored information in each electronic voting machine. All the votes were being read by proprietary software on a Dell PC. The Dell kept crashing, almost after every card was read (if at all) and the official had to unplug the reader and switch USB ports every time, then clicking through some driver error messages and wizards and restarting the tabulation software and doing this and doing that. It seemed like a constant, endless process.
I thought it was pretty unsettling that our votes are being tallied like this.