Voting Machine Mess-up Du Jour (Displayed 07/19/04)

New Castle County, Delaware. November 2000. Danaher Controls ELECTronic 1242 Model 6T Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines New Castle County had a 3.6% undervote rate for the presidential race in 2000. This means that as many as 3.6% of the votes for president were uncounted. This information was recently brought to the attention of Delaware Commissioner of Elections Frank Calio.*
	"I find it difficult to understand the huge undervote in New Castle," Calio said. "That research was eye-opening. We've never had any reports of anything going wrong with our machines. We need to find out what the problem is. We're not going to whitewash this."

* Votes at risk in some states. Scripps Howard News Service. July 9, 2004. By Thomas Hargrove and Michael Collins.

... the system we have for testing and certifying
voting equipment in this country
is not only broken, but is virtually nonexistent.
~ Michael Shamos
to the U.S. House Science subcommittee
on June 24, 2004