Many proponents of paperless voting defend the use of computerized voting machines by attributing electronic election disasters to human error.

Since voting systems are designed by humans, manufactured by humans, programmed by humans; as well as tested, installed, configured, set up, operated, and voted on by humans; it is difficult to think of a type of machine failure that might not be attributed to humans.

Here's a smattering of recent election problems and the humans whose errors may have caused the problems.

Human error by ...		Election problem ...
Ballot programmer, and tester		Ballot programming error declared landslide victories for two losing candidates.
Manufacturer, software programmers, and/or tester		Poll workers were unable to start up encoders.
User interface designer, trainers, and poll workers		Poll workers had difficulty using the system and gave the wrong ballots to 7000 voters.
Hardware design engineer and/or manufacturer, and tester		Hardware failed, voters couldn't get the machines to record their choices.
Software programmer and tester		Ballots won't print correctly if data is imported too many times during the setup process.
User interface designer, firmware programmer, tester and/or voters		134 ballots were blank in a one-race election.
Hardware design engineer and tester		A malfunction with one machine caused all nine machines in the polling place to go down.
Firmware programmer and tester		Two lines of code in the wrong order corrupted the audit log when a low-battery message was recorded to the log.
Tally software programmer and tester		Software couldn't read data from the secondary audit log.
County elections staff		Elections data, lost in machine failure, had not been backed up. Later, a backup CD was found.
User interface designer, and/or developer, and tester		Accessibility features for the blind weren't helpful.