US voting machine debacle

Can You Count on Voting Machines?
By CLIVE THOMPSON, The New York Times Magazine, January 6, 2008
Jane Platten gestured, bleary-eyed, into the secure room filled with voting machines. It was 3 a.m. on Nov. 7, and she had been working for 22 hours straight. "I guess we've seen how technology can affect an election," she said. The electronic voting machines in Cleveland were causing trouble again.
For a while, it had looked as if things would go smoothly for the Board of Elections office in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. About 200,000 voters had trooped out on the first Tuesday in November for the lightly attended local elections, tapping their choices onto the county's 5,729 touch-screen voting machines. The elections staff had collected electronic copies of the votes on memory cards and taken them to the main office, where dozens of workers inside a secure, glass-encased room fed them into the "GEMS server," a gleaming silver Dell desktop computer that tallies the votes.
Then at 10 p.m., the server suddenly froze up and stopped counting votes. Cuyahoga County technicians clustered around the computer, debating what to do. A young, business-suited employee from Diebold—the company that makes the voting machines used in Cuyahoga—peered into the screen and pecked at the keyboard. No one could figure out what was wrong. So, like anyone faced with a misbehaving computer, they simply turned it off and on again. Voilà: It started working—until an hour later, when it crashed a second time. Again, they rebooted. By the wee hours, the server mystery still hadn't been solved.
Worse was yet to come. When the votes were finally tallied the next day, 10 races were so close that they needed to be recounted. But when Platten went to retrieve paper copies of each vote—generated by the Diebold machines as they worked—she discovered that so many printers had jammed that 20 percent of the machines involved in the recounted races lacked paper copies of some of the votes. They weren't lost, technically speaking; Platten could hit "print" and a machine would generate a replacement copy. But she had no way of proving that these replacements were, indeed, what the voters had voted. She could only hope the machines had worked correctly.
Click here to keep reading:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06Vote-t.html

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hey, maybe you'll find this insensitive!

my friend John and i were IM chatting about the A's trading Swish. John then said he was displeased that the kid who got mauled to death by the TIGER (here here here here here and my personal favorite! - here) happened to be named Sousa. I'm sure there are a lotta Sousa's out there [even a Sousaphone, John!] so stupid shitheels are bound to ruin your good name, right?

Back to the tiger. Say, you remember in Apocalypse now when Chef (when he still had his head) got off the boat to look for some mangoes? and he is out on the shore, cruising for mangoes, cuz he was a Saucier, and teh fuckin tiger comes up on him and almost gets poor 'ol chef? And Chef jumps on the boat, and screams "Go!" and Lance (or is it Clean?) opens up on the jungle with the forward 50 calibers...and Chef is screaming "a fucking tiger man, a fucking tiger"...?

you remember that part? and Chef then reiterates the famous line (to me anyway) "Never get off the fucking boat".

You think that scene was going through the cops heads; the ones who shot that tiger as they were creeping through the pitch black zoo that fateful night? Cuz i woulda shit my pants right then. yessir.

the point - john came up with a term that i love. while we can't decide which is correct, both are hysterical. Getting Roy'd vs getting Siegfried'd. which do you prefer? does it matter who it actually happened to? would you ever put your frikkin head in a tiger's mouth?

Have you frikkin people heard of Darwin? Cuz those two moronic brothers and the mauling victim (relative of John's - jk) are up there in their respective categories.