So this machine has now been decertified. Fine. What I'd like to know: How could it ever get certified? What does certified even mean if not accountability of a certifier in case a system doesn't do what it's certified to do? Or is the certification process flawed? In that case I guess that should be fixed next.
The certification was done by the Election Assistance Commission, created in the wake of the Florida 2000 punchcard ballot debacle. The EAC hastily certified the first batch of electronic voting machines, issued grants to the states to buy them before the ink on the certifications was dry, and then was promptly forgotten about. (There was a 3-year period when the EAC was unable to do business because all the seats on its board were vacant.)
Why didn't they just fall back to paper and pencil, and manual counting? We've been doing that in the Netherlands since election machines were discredited after a successful campaign by hackers. Haven't had any real problems with it.
Why would an agency create a reliable system for counting votes, when it was created by an administration which came to power because of problems with counting votes?
