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Bug after Bug, Problem after Problem!
Finally, High Costs Save the Day
1) The problems started in April 2002 immediately after Miami-Dade County officials deployed their new ES&S iVotronic paperless electronic voting systems. An ES&S employee made a last minute change to the ballot definition file, changing the order of the candidates, and the results showed wins for the wrong candidates.
2) Then in the September 2002 election, an average of 8.2% of the votes were lost in 31 problem precincts. In some precincts the loss was as high as 21.5%.
3) In May of 2004, the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition obtained of a memo from the elections office, revealing that there was a bug in the audit software — a bug ES&S had known about for a year and hadn't fixed.
4) In the August 2004 Primary, many problems plagued the system. Audio ballots malfunctioned; machines worked in some electrical outlets and not in others; low-battery conditions triggered the audit bug. The county received 14,253 complaint forms filled out by voters.
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Lester Sola's full report
Thank you, Ellen Brodsky
Recent Report from
Miami-Dade Election
Reform Coalition
and Appendices
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5) A study of the 2004 General Election, released in May 2005 revealed thousands of discrepancies between the vote totals and the number of voters. Both phantom votes and excessive undervote rates abounded.
6) The March 2005 special election suffered from a programming error that lost over 1200 ballots, called into question five previous elections, and cost Elections Supervisor Constance Kaplan her job.
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7) Finally, after three years of disenfranchised voters and questionable results, the new Supervisor of Elections, Lester Sola, is recommending getting rid of the iVotronic machines and using optical scanners — NOT because of malfunctions that affected the democratic process, but because the elections have been costing about five times as much, twice the budget.
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Printable summary prepared by New Yorkers for Verified Voting
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May 28. Elections chief urges Miami-Dade to ditch touch-screen machines. Miami-Dade County's elections chief has strongly recommended that its ATM-style voting machines be ditched for optical scan ones that use paper ballots, another black mark for the devices that were billed as a way to avoid a repeat of the 2000 presidential election fiasco.
Story Archive
May 28. Miami-Dade's elections chief urges new system. After repeated embarrassing glitches at the polls, elections officials in Miami-Dade County have recommended scrapping the county's $24.5 million electronic voting system in favor of paper ballots with optical scanners.
Story Archive
May 28. Voting system change in Dade likely. Miami-Dade is poised to be the first place in the nation to ditch the iVotronics paperless voting machines for paper-based balloting after the county's top election supervisor on Friday issued a memo ''strongly recommending'' the change.
If the county scraps the iVotronics, getting the new machines would take more than a year. County officials have been careful not to imply that the machines are faulty. The touch-screens are state certified and will continue to be used in upcoming elections while the issue is debated.
Story Archive
May 29. Paperless, touch-screen voting costs soar. Miami-Dade's controversial paperless voting machines cost taxpayers about $6.6 million to operate during November's presidential election - about twice what officials budgeted.
Story Archive
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News stories make it rapidly apparent that
electronic voting is not reliable, accurate, or secure.
Any one who claims otherwise is either uninformed or deceptive.
~ Joseph Holder
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