Reply #3: Italy: electronic vote-counting experiment during 2006 general election

[kster]

It is obvious to everyone that the above:

it should not be called "experiment"

Even if electronic results matched the manual ones in all 15000 polling rooms, this would not be a proof that they would match also in next elections. Infact in the next years hardware, software and also networks will surely different from those used for the so called "experimentation". At best the "experimentation" could only prove that computers can be programmed to sucessfully compute sums of integers and transmit the result to a central site! Infact the program simply added integer numbers (votes): 1 + 1 + 1 ...

it was useless...

Manual and electronic votes counting produce their results simultanoulsy and thus there are no advantage in adding electronic counting to the manual one. Futhermore the results were necesserely to be the manual ones, so counting them also electronically was a waste of time and money!

misbehaves...

the experiment was clearly useless, many of the technicians waited for the final manual result of the polling room and entered it into their computers. This
misbehave, while not allowed by the law, was generally accepted since in any case the final results were the manual ones as required by the law. In this way technicians saved a lot of clicking on their laptop (4 clicks each vote!) and the manual procedures went faster.

not every polling room run the "experiment" ...

Please note that in many polling room no "experiment" was carried out due to the lack of technicians. This happened in three out of six polling rooms of the polling station where I worked as a party representative

http://www.electronic-vote.org/NEWS/news_scrutinioe_en.php