To really fuck something up, you need a computer
This phrase was used yesterday on Radio-Canada to describe the first messed-up election that I have ever seen in my country. I didn’t have any problems when I voted last Sunday. In fact, I was pleased to see that, even though the vote was electronic, we were using a sheet of paper to mark our choices. It was then scanned into a machine that looked suspiciously like a paper shredder. I would have been a lot more worried had I been in Quebec city where voters had to use touch sensitive screens that produce no paper trails. Fortunately the anti-politician Andree Boucher won so there is no reasons to believe that fraud could have been involved.
And now La Presse is fronting with information that 45,000 votes were counted twice during the production of the preliminary results. Only a computer could be that dumb. Pierre Bourque wants every vote to be recounted by hand. He probably won’t win anyway but we’re not Americans, we need to feel confident in our election results.
Fortunately for the organizers, these elections weren’t something that people cared “passionately” about. Can you imagine the effects of such a screw-up during a referendum?
One of the main argument for using computers was that results were supposed to be released earlier. I am reminded of the old saying that you can have something done right, fast or cheap…pick two. I already know that we’re cheap so I’d rather see our democracy being done right than fast.
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I’m one of those who spent quite a bit of time in the last few months “on who will do the governing“. Yes, I was a political staffer during the municipal campaign. Sue me.
I can tell you that the fact that the City’s servers couldn’t communicate to the political parties who had voted, and who hadn’t yet, was a major pain in the a**.
That’s before the fact that we didn’t have the results till early Monday morning (I got them from a journalist who emailed them to me): you can imagine how well the candidates slept.
It’s also before the fact that one of my candidates who had lost (by 12 votes) in the first version of the results became a winner Tuesday morning (by 11 votes) in the second version of the results.
MS
just a side note about computers. they are not dumb, the programmer is to be blamed
Just a side anote about Long’s side note:
In this case, I think that although it might have included programming issues (I’m in no position to know), I know it was little more than that.
See, if there was a f***-up, nobody could operate the computers or the electronic urns or the printers.
Now is that the individual user’s fault? I don’t think so: I think it was the Directrice des