No, The voters are not the problem

The Charleston Gazette is running an article about early voters having their votes switch from Obama to McCain.

Two of the voters describe the problem like this:

"When I touched the screen for Barack Obama, the check mark moved from his box to the box indicating a vote for John McCain." - Virginia Matheney

"When I pushed Obama, it jumped to McCain. When I went down to governor's office and punched [Gov. Joe] Manchin, it went to the other dude. When I went to Karen Facemyer [the incumbent Republican state senator], I pushed the Democrat, but it jumped again. The rest of them were OK, but the machine sent my votes for those top three offices from the Democrat to the Republican" - Calvin Thomas

That sounds like a pretty big problem. It sounds like the machine knew they were touching the screen to indicate a vote for Obama and after registering that information by marking the box it then changed the vote to McCain. That is not acceptable. Here was the response from the county election officials:

"[Jackson County Clerk Jeff] Waybright blamed the problem on voters."
"People make mistakes more than the machines," he [Waybright] said, "but I went in yesterday and recalibrated the machines. We are doing everything we can not to disenfranchise anybody."

No, wrong. This is not a voter problem. The software on the voting machines should absolutely prevent this from happening. I can think of two possible situation as to what the software may do to cause this behavior and either option is unacceptable in a voting machine and the software should be fixed. This is typical government type reaction to using a crappy product, rather than demand a product that is well designed they believe that training everyone to use a non-intuitive and crappily designed product is the solution.

Here's scenario 1: The boxes used to select a candidate are too close together and the software has a hard time determining which box the user actually touched. Solution. Vote for one office at a time, candidate choices are buttons that are 3 inch squares with 3 inches between them. Lots of room to do this.

Scenario 2: The software registers any touch that doesn't land in a box as a touch for the first box or last box on the screen. No, bad. Wrong. The software should be designed to ignore any click that doesn't clearly land inside a candidate box.

And, to add to that it should be really easy to allow the voter to verify their ballot. Once you made your selections you should get a Confirmation Page, like everything in the world gives you. It should say something like "For President you have selected:" and then in VERY BIG BOLD LETTERS the name of the candidate. "Is this correct?" Yes, No.

Software that randomly switches votes is absolutely unacceptable. I've been through this tirade before, so I won't go all the way into it. I will suffice it to say that the current crop of electronic voting machines could be the worst thing to happen to democracy in a long time. The ability to commit election fraud on a county and state level is incredibly simplified with insecure, poorly designed machines that provide no paper backup of what is happening.