Oh, but computers never have problems, never make mistakes:

In Indiana's Marion County, about 175 of 914 precincts turned to paper because poll workers didn't know how to run the machines, said Marion County Clerk Doris Ann Sadler. She said it could take most of the day to fix all of the machine-related issues.

Election officials in Delaware County, Ind., planned to seek a court order to extend voting after an apparent computer error prevented voters from casting ballots in 75 precincts there. County Clerk Karen Wenger said the cards that activate the machines were programmed incorrectly.

"We are working with precincts one-by-one over the telephone to get the problem fixed," Wenger said....

...A precinct in Orange Park, Fla., turned to paper ballots because of machine problems. Voting was delayed for 30 minutes or more at some Broward County precincts, where electronic ballots were mixed up and, in one case, a poll worker unintentionally wiped the electronic ballot activators....

...In one of the worst fiascoes, Maryland election officials forgot to send the cards primary voters needed to activate electronic machines at their polling places, and some voters had to cast provisional ballots on scraps of paper.

Baltimore County election director Jacqueline McDaniel said the poll workers had a few problems on Tuesday — one left part of the equipment in his car; another was looking in the wrong place for the electronic poll books.

Is this to be expected?

But voting equipment companies said they hadn't seen anything beyond the norm and blamed the problems largely on human error.

"Any time there's more exposure to equipment, there are questions about setting up the equipment and things like that," said Ken Fields, a spokesman for Election Systems & Software Inc. "Overall, things are going very well."

Going very well in that he and his company got paid very well by the taxpayers. Thank you, Mr. Fields, for your public service.

Florida Secretary of State Sue Cobb said she didn't expect serious problems Tuesday. The Justice Department was deploying poll watchers at dozens of potential trouble spots nationwide.

"History has shown that the machines are far more accurate than paper so we're quite confident in it," Cobb said. "There is absolutely no reason to believe that there will be any security issues, any hacking going on."

Noooo, of course not! Only control of the most powerful government in the world is at stake. No reason why anyone would do to election computers what they have been doing to ATMs, corporate databases, government databases, Social Security computers, and your own computer every day!

Noooo, computers are perfect! Never mind they're running secret programs that the public cannot examine to see if it's fair. Never mind that the boxes can be hacked in under a minute.

If you find this disheartening, it's all the more reason to vote. If you don't vote, it will be that much harder to get these insecure machines running secret code investigated and removed from our elections process.

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