Nun nimmt sich auch ars.technica des Themas an und wirft einen Blick auf die Congresswahlen in den USA in der letzten Woche: Electronic voting: the silent catastrophe

Es ist schon interessant zu sehen, welche neuen Begriffe sich die Diskussion um Wahlen eingeführt haben: vote flipping, undervotes oder re-voting. Der Bericht verweist auf zahlreiche Vorfallssammlungen und führt einige herausstechende auf. Darunter dieser Fall aus Florida:

The Miami Herald reports that 18,382 votes either weren’t cast or weren’t counted in the race for House District 13, Katherine Harris’s old seat. What this means is that of all of the voters who went to the polls in that district, signed in, and cast ballots, 18,382 of them either didn’t vote in the House race or didn’t have their votes recorded. So one out of every seven ballots cast in that race did not register a vote for the House seat; this is an extremely high number of undervotes.

Ein Siebtel der Stimmen im Nirvana. Und jetzt?

„The Republican in this race, Vernon Buchanan, has declared victory on the basis of a 368-vote margin and stated that it’s ‚time to move on.‘ Yeah, I bet he’d like to move on and forget about the 18,000+ missing votes, but his opponent, Christine Jennings, is going to fight it out. Right now, the official plan is to conduct a ‚recount,‘ but of course a legitimate recount is impossible to conduct for touchscreen machines with no paper trail, where a vote was never recorded in the first place. So the recount idea is going nowhere. There’s certain to be litigation here, but there’s just no way to recover the intent of the voters with these machines.

Genau. Nachzählen ist bei Wahlcomputern ohne Zettelbeleg totally pointless. Aber kiek an: vor kurzem gab es dort ein Referendum und dort wurden die Abschaffung der Maschinen beschlossen:

Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent has now done a 180 and will comply with voters‘ demands to scrap the electronic machines entirely and return to paper ballots. Dent had previously accused proponents of a voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) of trying to obstruct the vote and „disenfranchise“ voters. But in light of a newly passed referendum demanding a return to paper ballots (at least those referendum votes were counted), and in light of the embarrassingly large number of undervotes in Sarasota County, Dent has thankfully changed her tune.

Wenn es schon in Florida möglich ist, wieder zur Papierwahl zurückzukehren, dann sollte es uns doch nicht schwer fallen, den derzeitigen Wahlcomputeranteil von 5% auf 0% zu senken.

Update: Heise hat es jetzt auch: Wahlcomputer in Florida unterschlagen jede achte Stimme