It's not a glitch, darn it.

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Rich Kulawiec <rsk () gsp org>
Date: November 6, 2004 1:02:02 PM EST
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Cc: peter royal <peter.royal () pobox com>, David Chessler 
<chessler () usa net>
Subject: It's not a glitch, darn it.


Back in August, David Chessler's forwarded to IP part of an article by
Bev Harris, entitled "Sum of a Glitch", which included this statment;

        I discovered four magic words, "voting machines and glitch,"
        which, when entered into a search engine, yielded a shocking
        result: A staggering pile of miscounts was accumulating.

Of course, once the search engines index the thousands of reports
resulting from the US elections held this past week, that pile is
going to be quite a bit larger.

But that's not why I'm writing this.  I'm writing this to object to
the use of the term "glitch".  Here's why:

People have fought, bled and died for the right to vote.  Living memory
still recalls the shameful incidents in which minorities (and others)
were intimidated, attacked, and discriminated against in order to 
prevent
them from exercising the franchise.  Even *now*, there are still ongoing
attempts to keep people from the polls -- as in the phony telephone 
calls
in Ohio last week, or the targeting of some voters in Florida.

When a voting system -- whether it's a computerized one or not -- does
not correctly count someone's vote, that's not a glitch.  That's a 
failure.

And it's not just a failure for the person who's vote wasn't counted
properly, it's a failure for all of us.  (I trust that *everyone*,
whoever/whatever they support, doesn't want that candidate or ballot 
issue
to prevail because someone else's vote wasn't counted: they want their
side to win because everyone's vote WAS counted and their 
candidate/issue
came out ahead.  I also trust that it's clear to everyone that if things
don't work out this way, that representative democracy is broken.)

In the many accounts of election-day experiences this week, I read one
(perhaps at evoting-experts.com, but I can't find it just now) which
told the story of how two new citizens of the US were so thrilled to be
able to vote that they took each other's pictures at the polling place.

*They get it.*  They get it because they grasp how precious this right
is, and how any erosion of it is intolerable.

We all need to get it, too.  We need to stop classifying voting system
failures as "glitches".  A "glitch" is when a word processor puts a
paragraph break in the wrong place, or billing system is off by a nickel
on every invoice, or a web server is missing a URL for a JPG.

Miscounting a vote is a failure: a serious and unacceptable failure.

---Rsk

p.s. Let me also slide in a response to this item from today's IP:

> This is an interesting time for electronic voting. India,
> the largest democracy in the world, went completely paper-
> free for its general elections earlier this year. For the
> first time, some 387 million people expressed their
> electoral right electronically. Despite initial concerns
> about security and correctness of the system, the election
> process was a smashing success.

If we define "smashing success" as including such things as "accurately
counted every ballot" and "ensured the privacy of every ballot" --
and I sure hope that's how we define it -- then I have a question:

How do you know?

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