VOTING2.CBS 07/28/04 8:13 AM-DLR   1:24
Dude where's my vote?  This is Dave Ross on the CBS Radio Network.
The election of 2000 taught us that perforated paper is a lousy way to record votes.
And so THIS year, in many counties, your vote will be recorded by high tech, ultra secure, state-of-the art computerized touch-screen machines.  
Including Miami, where they were used in the 2002 primary for governor.  
There was a learning curve in that election - the machines took too long to boot up, poll workers had trouble running them - and the ACLU concluded that as a result, 31 Miami-area precincts lost a total of 1,544 votes.  Not enough to change the outcome, but enough to raise a few questions.
Elections officials, after their OWN investigation, found that weak batteries HAD affected the machines' event logs, which record everything the machine does in case you have to go back and check.   When the batteries run low, the machines get a kind of digital dementia which can, for example, send out the wrong electronic serial numbers.
But the vote tallies, they said, were unaffected by this.
Well, a law professor wanted to double check.  So she requested the event logs.  But when county officials looked for them, they were gone.  Like the votes themselves, the event logs had been stored electronically, and they had somehow been erased.  In a computer crash.  Along with the event logs for several other elections.
The company that makes the touch-screen machines has since fixed the problem.  But that ... seems unnecessarily anal.
Because the whole idea here is to avoid another recount crisis.  And what better way to do that - than by making sure there's nothing to recount?   Now this.
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