3 ms·
In my opinion, this is very obviously a touchscreen calibration issue, probably caused by the use of a crappy (read: cheap) touchscreen in the voting machine.
by stevenwei 14y ago
In my opinion, this is very obviously a touchscreen calibration issue, probably caused by the use of a crappy (read: cheap) touchscreen in the voting machine.
A lot of people are dismissing the calibration issue because of the "calibration test" the user described performing:
"Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney's name and started tapping very closely together to find the 'active areas'. From the top of Romney's button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama's name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein's button was fine. All other buttons worked fine."
However, this test does does not actually demonstrate anything. With resistive and infrared touchscreens, which are commonly used in kiosks, it is entirely possible to have some subsections of the screen work incorrectly, while the rest works correctly. Therefore the fact that some buttons work fine does not prove that the touchscreen is, in fact, correctly calibrated.
I've done a lot of work with kiosk touchscreens, and the first culprit I thought of when seeing that video was that the touchscreen was miscalibrated. The second culprit I thought of was that the touchscreen itself was faulty.
Resistive and infrared touchscreens are very prone to these types of problems, and I've seen many scenarios similar to this across hundreds of different touchscreens. (Often, just one corner of the screen will go out of wack, while the rest of it works perfectly. I've seen this happen many times.)
The only way to know if the screen was actually correctly calibrated is to re-calibrate the screen and see if the issue persists, and if it does, to replace the touchscreen itself (as it could be faulty, not uncommon among cheap touchscreens either). Neither of these steps was performed by the user, therefore he has no way of concluding that the screen was correctly calibrated. I suspect that once these tests are performed, it will be obvious that the touchscreen is to blame.
There's a lot of outrage here at the idea of the voting machine altering votes, but I think the following quote applies: never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
The real outrage should be that these voting machines were deployed with such crappy touchscreens built into them (probably to cut costs for the manufacturer).