For
seven days, a paperless voting machine sat mute. It refused to tell
Collin County elections officials and observers what votes it had
recorded at Rose Mary Haggar Elementary School on Campbell Road.
The
touch-screen machine locked up during voting Nov. 2 and was taken out
of service. Election night, despite
coaxing from technicians, the machine would not divulge results from
63 voters.
Officials
gathered around again six days later, on Monday, but the machine
wouldn't budge despite the best attempts
by experts from the manufacturer, Diebold Election Systems.
They
met again the following day. County elections officials reported they
had sent the machine's memory card to
Diebold laboratories in Canada so technicians there could attempt to
extract the numbers. They reported that attempts were successful and
that the results were finally in.
The
mere fact that a piece of Collin County's election record left the
country should be cause for concern.
We
have called before for the county to heed the reasonable and
widespread call for a verifiable paper record of every vote cast. The
experience of the Haggar Elementary voting machine ought to point up
the obvious pitfalls of this type of electronic voting machine.
Collin
County spent $2.7 million to buy 700 of the touch-screen machines
last year. Nov. 2 was the big test, with
more than 154,000 voters heading to the polls.
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