Recent reports that voting machines in Charlottesville, Alexandria and Falls Church are cutting off the names of candidates—most notably U.S. Senate challenger James Webb—are fueling many conspiracy theories in the blogosphere.
The issue? When voters in Charlottesville reach the “summary page” on the Hart InterCivic voting machines, they will see abbreviated names for every candidate except Al Weed, the Democrat running for the House. A vote for George Allen will show “George F. Allen –”; a vote for Webb will show “James H. ‘Jim’.”
In an election where the Democrat is lacking name recognition and the Republican might very well not wish to be affiliated with the party, those omissions have stirred some paranoia. “Amazing how these voting machine ‘glitches’ negatively affect only democratic party candidates,” reads a comment posted on www.thewolfweb.com. A post on www.dailykos.com asks, “3 f*ing years and they can’t get it right? Seems like someone wanted this to happen.”
“It just makes me sick,” says Sheri Iachetta, general registrar for Charlottesville. “I’m sitting here reading all these blogs, where it’s talking about ‘mechanical machine failure.’ It’s not. It’s not a threat to democracy. It’s an unfortunate situation that we’ve realized and been very proactive in fixing and will get completely fixed at the first of the year.”
When a Charlottesville voter selects the person they’d like to vote for in both the Senate and House races, the full name and party affiliation of the candidate is shown. It’s only after all voting selections have been made that the summary page appears. “Basically, it’s the last ditch effort to change your mind prior to hitting ‘cast ballot,’” says Iachetta.
She spells out that if the problem were fixed now, it would erase all absentee votes already cast. The problem with the summary page, which is caused by an overly large font size, has been an issue since the machines were introduced in 2002. Iachetta notes that Webb’s name was truncated the exact same way in the June primary.
Iachetta says hacking is not a concern. “We don’t have a wireless system—we have very secure procedures and even the security experts have come seen our procedures and told us that we have very good, secure procedures.”
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