Cause of voting machine fire still mystery

[cory777]

Source: Houston Chronicle

A day after a fire destroyed virtually all of Harris County's electronic voting gear, officials were still determining the cause of the warehouse blaze and furiously exploring ways to accommodate voters come early November.

Houston's fire marshal's office hasn't made a ruling on whether Friday's early-morning fire was accidental or deliberately set, said Harris County Clerk Beverly Kaufman, who hopes to hear something on the cause early this week.

"It would break my heart to think someone would do something like this to the election process," she said, adding that she was unaware of anyone who might have had a motive to burn down the building.

Houston Fire Department officials did not return phone calls Saturday.

Read more: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7176111.html

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[DFW]

1. I have a theory as to what caused the fire

The Republicans were testing their machines in secret, and their machines were tallying Republican votes at such dizzying
speed, that the machines overheated and flames started spurting from them at such a pace as to not be able to be contained.

[RandomThoughts]

2. What comedy in that statement.

Must be a joke article.

"It would break my heart to think someone would do something like this to the election process,"

If the machines can't be validated how is it an election process?

[EFerrari]

4. No kidding. And isn't Harris County one of those frequent flyers?

The name rings a bell as one where there have been problems in the past.

[tomm2thumbs]

3. the machines committed self-immolation due to guilt from being unable to tell the truth

we can only hope other machines across the country are as brave

<g>

[me b zola]

5. Paper ballot and a pen

"A day after a fire destroyed virtually all of Harris County's electronic voting gear, officials were still determining the cause of the warehouse blaze and furiously exploring ways to accommodate voters come early November

A paper ballot and a pen has been know to work effectively. They also leave a record of votes so a recount is possible if necessary. This isn't brain surgery.

[yourout]

6. Hand counted paper ballots would be a huge problem for Republicans.

[krispos42]

9. Yeah, much more flammable... n/t

[krispos42]

8. Just give me the names and a couple of hours with Word.

I'll have a ballot, make it into a PDF, email it to them... they can print one out and xerox it a million times.

[Chicago dyke]

10. it really makes you wonder about state officials and voting officials

i mean, what's the problem? paper, pens, a copy machine or computer or both. they have all that stuff, they can get a lock box at the hardware store. these are the people responsible for counting our votes, and they sustain greater fear of bureaucratic gobbldigook than ensuring voters exercise democracy.

[quakerboy]

14. To be fair

There are something like 4 million people in Harris county. Even if you assume that 1/3 are too young to vote, and another third don't care to vote, that's still 1.3 million voters.

My printer can theoretically print up to 18 pages a minute. If you don't account for wear and tear breaking a machine down, ink needing to be replaced every few hundred sheets, or any other potential logistical problem, that would still take 51 days of straight printing.

Alternately, I just went to Xerox.com. Their $1600 office model can do up to 30 PPM, so that could bring it down to 31 days of straight copying, no time for restroom breaks

And that's if they can fit it on a single sheet of paper. Make it double sided, and you double the time. Add a second double sided sheet, and you make it 4 times that long. I am sure that the legal sized paper, which is what my ballots come on, takes a bit longer as well.

Now, I am sure that they have more than one person with one printer, so in reality the time could be much reduced. But they also have a need to protect those ballots before the election so that no one gets their hands on "extras" for their side to stuff in the boxes. They probably have esoteric and even stupid regulations about how a ballot must appear, what kinda paper it must be on, etc. That would be the bureaucratic gobbldigook you mentioned. But even that is sometimes there to protect us, to make sure that our older voters can actually read the ballot, that it has to be crafted in such a way that you can easily understand who you just voted for(see butterfly ballot, Florida)

How many locked boxes does it take to hold 1.3 million sheets of paper. 5000 sheets in a box of copy paper, so 267 boxes of paper(again, if its a single sheet, otherwise it starts doubling, and the legal size paper is also gonna take up more room per sheet) means, at a conservative estimate, you would need at least 135 good sized locked boxes. More than most hardware stores can scrounge up on short notice.

I agree that their best bet would be take it back to paper. And use this as impetus to work out a superior voting system. But the numbers involved mean that this is no minor logistical challenge.

[boppers]

17. You've apparently not worked with printing presses.

60 pages a second is *normal* on a reasonably fast web press. Not per minute, per second. Web presses run at pretty intense speeds, which is how newspapers (etc.), with their many pages, many copies, get printed fresh daily. A million ballots is almost nothing, a few hours at most.

As far as the boxes goes, Oregon has a pretty good solution (IMO)... we call them "mailboxes". They already exist, and there's an established system for collection, protected by federal law.

[quakerboy]

18. I fully agree

However, I find it doubtful that that particular elections office happens to own a web press. And the poster I was responding to stated that surely they had a printer or a copier and could handle the situation.

As far as Oregon.. Yes. I would take our system over pretty much any other state's system. But I find it doubtful that one county in Texas can independently and between now and the November election get passed whatever laws, regulations, etc, to put our system in place.

[krispos42]

7. The cause is evident

We know what happens under those circumstances. English-speaking countries even have a multi-generational chant to describe it:

Liar liar RAM on fire!

[dickthegrouch]

11. We should tell the rethugs

It was an act of God wanting to stop them from propagating their hate and lies.

And that machines can no more bear false witness than they can.

[Caretha]

12. I'm very concerned

Bill White, a democrat is running for Governor in Texas against "Good Hair Perry, and is showing solid signs that he can beat Perry.

White was a very successful Mayor for six years in Houston. He received 91% of the votes for mayor when he ran for his second term.

If there is a disruption in the voting process in Houston, I'm afraid it could alter the election results for Governor.

Edited to add - Houston is a major population center in Texas with almost 6 million according to the 2010 projected census.

[quakerboy]

13. Gee darn golly

Maybe they will just have to have a paper ballot come November. Wouldn't that just be horrifying.

[Yeahyeah]

15. I doubt anything suspicious ever happens in Houston.

[truthisfreedom]

16. Professional printing company, people.

It's not rocket science.

[Igel]

19. No.

In some ways, rocket science is easier.

We have lots of precincts in Harris County. A dozen incorporated cities, lots of criss-crossing federal and state and city and county jurisdictions, school boards all over the place. That makes for a lot of distinct ballots, each with a couple dozen or more questions/offices to be filled.

Oct. 18 or thereabouts early voting starts. I can go anywhere in Harris County and expect to get my precinct's ballot, complete it, and turn it in. If it's paper, it'll have to be either properly segregated from other precincts' ballots or there'll have to be some fairly foolproof way of making sure that it's counted for my precinct. Moreover, the method used also has to record if I voted during early voting so that I can't vote on election day.

45 days to design the ballots, design the system for distributing and collecting early voting ballots, train the poll workers to that system, then collect and store several hundred thousand ballots.

During that same time, they have to work out how they'll be storing them, counting them, verifying the count.

By now, places that use paper ballots have almost all of that done and most of the ballots are printed. Houston has a fairly large manufacturing base, we could probably print the ballots. The rest of it is non-trivial, though.

Should you get it all in place--and should it be permitted--it'll be fun seeing what people do with the paper ballots. I've seen some dumbass things done with e-Slate machines and that process by voters. You think the Florida butterfly ballot was bad?

I've seen poll workers do stupid things with paper ballots, as well. As in "intentionally do things that had the net result of disqualifying them." Of course, the "intention" was to make sure they were completed properly; it's just that the dem precinct chair was clueless when he insisted on personally supervising affidavit/provisional ballots for dems. (The repubs actually looked at the flip chart for instructions.)

This election is going to be a nightmare.

[unkachuck]

20. "...officials were still determining the cause of the warehouse blaze..."

....are the electronic voting machines self-destructing after tallying a big Texas repub victory?....why do red state have such a hard time with voting machines?

....credit card companies can tally your fuckin' interest to a fraction of a cent over a twenty year period but after two hundred years we still can't secure and count votes accurately in this country....

[sofa king]

21. No doubt the fires were fueled by lies and deception.

[Javaman]

22. Tin foil hat time!

:tinfoilhat:

Come november when the election is close and cement head perry is on the ropes, he will claim that that particular district, since it didn't have electronic voting, is suspect. That paper ballots can't be trusted.

Then some sort of bullshit legal justification will be promoted as grounds for some other bullshit ruling. Thus dragging out the election results for months all the while cement head continues on as governor trying in a vein attempt at setting some sort of bizarre precedent.

what the repukes learned from Frankins campaign was, two can play at the vote counting game.

Not about counting all votes, but how to eliminate them.

:tinfoilhat: