Snippet: When Voting Machines Go Bad ☇

Regardless of who you may be voting for today, this is pretty scary. As T.C. Sottek reports for The Verge, a voter in Pennsylvania recorded and posted a video on YouTube of a touch-screen voting machine selecting Mitt Romney’s name when he actually tapped President Barack Obama’s name, although tapping Jill Stein’s name registered for the Green Party candidate, so it wasn’t a calibration error:

Considering that we haven’t heard widespread reports of voters experiencing such blatant selection issues, it’s likely that this is an isolated incident — the voter says “I asked the voters on either side of me if they had any problems and they reported they did not.” Still, it’s a powerful demonstration of where electronic systems, promoted for their accuracy and reliability, can go wrong. To make matters worse, the voter says that election officials seemed unconcerned with the issue. “I then called over a volunteer to have a look at it,” he says. “She him hawed for a bit then calmly said ‘it’s nothing to worry about, everything will be okay,’ and went back to what she was doing.” We’ve asked the voter to confirm the story and will update you if we receive more information.