Comedian Poised for the Senate: Poor tech maintence a potentail factor

If you haven't been following the Minnesota Senate race, and I can't imagine why you wouldn't, now is the time to take a look. Comedian Al Franken, perhaps best known for his Saturday Night Live persona's, is only 236 votes away from displacing incumbent Senator Norm Coleman. Coleman's razor-thin lead was narrowed from over 700 votes, just 0.01 percent, to the current 236 votes, when a hand recount was ordered due to state law involving such a narrow winning margin. Before officials began the ballot hand recount, corrections submitted from various precincts severed the gap by almost two thirds to a 236 vote lead in favor of the incumbent as of Friday morning.

The flood of corrections stems from the optical scanners used to tally the ballots in the election. Wired reported earlier this week, that the M-100 scanner, manufactured by Election Systems & Software, used for tallying votes recently failed accuracy tests in nearby counties. Ars Technica spoke with University of Iowa computer scientist Douglas Jones, an expert on optical scan voting systems, about the accuracy of the ES&S readers.
"In the testing I've done on the M-100, it's been pretty good," said Jones. "It tended to count as a vote the things I naively thought it should count, and it tended not to count the things I thought it shouldn't count. A single pencil stroke through the oval was enough—it didn't need me to blacken it all the way in."
The problem in the counties plagued with failing scanners, noted Jones, was a product poor maintenance. The state refrained from maintaining its machines, due to concerns about voiding the warranty, but at the same time no efforts were made for the manufacturer to service the machines. "The more you look at it, the more fish you smell," Jones told Ars Technica. "The county says the machines haven't seen preventative maintenance in two years. You've got to at the very least blow the dust out of them! If you don't do that you end up scanning dust instead of scanning ballots." Either way, even with consistent maintenance, Jones explained, "It's not uncommon in the studies I've seen for 4 percent of ballots in absentee voting to need to be seen by human eyes... Even in precinct voting, you'd expect to have to look at 1 or 2 percent of ballots directly. Over votes should get caught right there on the spot, but under votes may not be."
With growing speculation about the accuracy of the optical scanners centered around this controversy, Al Franken is by no means out of the race yet. As the comedian readies himself for the Senate, hopefully Minnesota is re-evaluating the outdated technology it has relied on for this years elections. While no one can blame a government for not implementing the cutting edge of technology, electronic voting machines haven't been a revolutionary idea for the past few years. For Minnesota and all the other state governments dragging their heals over the upgrade, this instance demonstrates the need for the inevitable upgrade. At the very least, a lesson should be learned about general maintenance; no piece of technology is self sufficient over time.