More on Monday's Meeting of the Iowa Board of Examiners for Voting Machines from Jerry Depew
by Jerry Depew, Laurens, Iowa
Iowa Voters for Open and Transparent Elections
You would have to be blind not to see that the Automark voting machine
needs more work. Actually, it was a blind woman named Penelope who
first saw it in Des Moines Monday. Or at least she discovered it. The
people looking over her shoulder really did see it.
Penelope
had come to the meeting of the Iowa Board of Examiners of Voting
Machines to test the device being examined. It marks ballots for people
who need help. It helps them while keeping their votes private. It
enabled Penelope to use headphones to hear the ballot read to her and
provided her with a button to push to mark her choices in every race on
the ballot.
No one
knows what Penelope did to upset the machine. She did not know anything
was wrong because the machine gave her the marked ballot at the end of
her testing. But the machine had also locked up and put an error
message on the screen. There was no audio error message, Penelope said.
I was
sitting where I could not see the screen. But we were all told that an
“argument out of range exception error” had occurred. No one knew what
that meant. The machine’s advocates called headquarters to find out.
They reported that this had occurred before in Illinois’s testing, and
a repair to the software was already being written in Omaha.
Not to
worry. Penelope was happy. She said she would cease voting absentee and
actually go to the polls in the future. She said it was “about time”
provisions were being made for blind voters.
The Board of Examiners decided the machine could stand to be rebooted if
this happened on election day. They focused on the fact that no damage
had been done to Penelope’s ballot. They certified the machine. Several
Iowa counties are planning to use it.
But I contacted John Washburn, a software tester with a decade of experience. He said such an error “is usually indicative of bad code being passed to an interpreter of some sort.”
Bad
code? Already detected in testing in Illinois? If this stuff gets past
the extensive federal testing we always hear about, how extensive can
it be?
We are
indeed lucky to have this problem appear on the device that marks paper
ballots. But this same company has also sold computer voting terminals
(with NO PAPER TRAIL) to seven Iowa counties. Did they use any bad code
in those machines? Was Penelope present the day those machines were
tested? Penelope – HELP US!
Jerry Depew of Laurens, Iowa, runs the non-partisan blog, Iowa Voters for Open and Transparent Elections, and has granted Blog for Iowa permission to reprint his report.
Blog For Iowa 
Jerry,
Congrats on your great new blog! Too bad we can't get this stuff from our local newspapers and TV stations… Let us know how we can help.
Trish and Ellen
RRIA
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