E-Voting Under Fire In Fairfax

Posted on November 18, 2003

It appears that there is not a complete common sense deficit in Fairfax County’s government — Democrats and Republicans on the county’s Board of Supervisors have joined together to request an investigation from the County Executive into this month’s e-voting election debacle.

Incredibly, though, the head of the board of elections, Margaret Luca, continues to defend the deeply flawed WINVote system:

Electoral board secretary Margaret K. Luca delivered an upbeat assessment in a memo to the supervisors. “Overall, the new voting machines worked well,” she wrote. “We had almost 1,000 new machines involved in an election for the first time, and only 10 of those posed a problem.”

Wow, get me some of what she’s having. Yes, “only” ten machines completely malfunctioned and had to be removed from the polling place for service, in violation of election laws. Oh, and there’s that other issue of the other 990 machines Slashdotting the central servers when they tried to upload the vote counts, leading to huge delays in compiling a final count — which is pretty fricking embarrassing in an off-year election, where turnout is always dismally low — but I guess that doesn’t fall under her definition of “posing a problem”. What a doorknob!

But anyway, with primary elections coming up in February, it looks like Fairfax is moving to try and get its act together in time. Maybe common sense is more common than we usually think!