Posted 1:44 PM

Much ado about not much

A tempest in a teapot is starting to whirl around a report done over a year ago which appears to be critical of electronic voting machines, or at least their auditing capabilities. The initial story about the report is from the Miami Daily Business Review, but the actual report itself (by Orlando Suarez, division manager of Dade County Florida's Enterprise Technology Services Department) isn't itself available, and that's too bad.

A close reading of the news report, though, shows that Suarez is complaining about a unified audit report, not the individual machine audit reports. As far as I can tell, the individual machines are fine, but the software which consolidates the audit logs appears to have some issues.

Still, nothing in the news story indicates there was any problem with the actual voting or tallying. Since the story begins: "A scathing internal review of the iVotronic touch-screen voting machines...", I would expect everything from the report which reflects poorly on electronic voting to be quoted. And all we got was that the consolidation software was cosmetically flawed. Big woof.