Friday, November 05, 2004

Houston, we have vote counting problems.

Oh, man, this is just fucking priceless. The salient excerpt
:

"An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said."

But here's the best part -- the explanation as to how this happened:

"The Ohio glitch is among a handful of computer troubles that have emerged since Tuesday's elections...On one of the three machines at that precinct, a malfunction occurred in the recording process, Damschroder said. He could not explain how the malfunction occurred."


Now, I work with computers on a pretty regular basis, and I can assure you that if a voting machine I was working on suddenly and magically gifted someone with 3,893 votes, I would not be allowed to explain that away with something as lame as, "Well, gee, I guess it was just a glitch, beats me."

Rather, I would have my ass hauled onto the carpet to explain, exactly and precisely, where that number came from, and why my software wasn't reliable to 5 decimal places. For someone to shrug their shoulders and not be able to explain this jaw-dropping discrepancy is nothing short of a scandal. And don't let anyone tell you different.

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