What a great quote! Ohio’s Secretary of State was interviewed for ComputerWorld and revealed the ridiculous level of error that was present throughout the certification and troubleshooting process. The results of the (deep breath) Evaluation & Validation of Election-Related Equipment, Standards & Testing (EVEREST) analysis were that every single system they looked at had “critical security failures” — these are the machines that may be tabulating your vote, paper or not, this coming November.
Indeed, the results were so bad that Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner declared:
When I finally saw the results of our [EVEREST] tests, I thought I was going to throw up. I didn’t think it would be that bad. And it was — it was awful. I looked at it on a Saturday morning, and that night I went to bed and woke up [just before 4:00 on] Sunday morning going, “Oh my God.” I never wake up on the weekends — trust me.
Mother of God! These were the problems mocked on XKCD, but which later were found to be much deeper than a virus checker incompatibility. I’m finding it really easy to remain politically neutral here, because this isn’t a party-based problem; the idea that these machines could be running wild with our votes without being addressed for years is a failure of the entire system of oversight. Clearly incompetence is nonpartisan.