On November 4th American voters will have to make sure their votes are taken into account. According to the New York Times the Diebold electronic voting machines, in which people will drop their votes nearly 3 weeks from today, have reported malfunctions.

The first reports of the machine’s miscounts were spotted and notified by election officials in Ohio in March primary count. Since then, Diebold has notified malfunctions in the machines of 30 more states. The votes that are dropped in the Diebold machines should be transferred from each machine to a central county election headquarter. An election worker inserts the memory card from the machine into the server. When this is done, a green arrow should appear as a signal that all the votes have been uploaded and added to the county’s total. On the machines that do not work correctly, the green arrow is wrong and none of the votes are added to the county’s server

When this problem was first spotted by Ohio election officials, Diebold  suggested  it was due to human errors or  an anti virus  on the machines  may have affected them.  But about 5 months later, in August, the company notified its clients the problem was a software glitch. The solution for this glitch would be to thoroughly check that every memory card was counted appropriately because there is no time to upgrade all the machines that need fixing. In case the votes are not uploaded, they can still be recovered, but since it depends on election workers to notice the malfunction and do something about it which is not a reliable option because election workers as volunteers, have thousands of tasks to perform in a very short time and with a whole lot of responsibility.

The New York Times editorial writes: ” Now it seems that hardly an election goes by without reports of serious vulnerabilities or malfunctions.” and they are most certainly right. Diebold has been sued by the Secretary of State in Ohio, Jennifer Brunner, who claims it’s machines crashed several times during the last year’s election in Cuyahoga County. Yet they were hired for the federal election as well.

A computer glitch is by definition any computer error. The word glitch, however, has a Yiddish origin glitsh which is a slippery area. The way things are going with the US election and it’s slippery machines, we cannot expect anything less than a very tense election day. We wouldnt want those votes slipping like they did last time in Florida.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/opinion/09thu2.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin