On Thursday, October 23, 2014 5:44:11 PM UTC-4, wrote:
On Thu, 23 Oct 2014 14:11:30 -0400, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:

On 10/23/2014 1:59 PM, Tim wrote:

I thought those vote machines were to be 100% inspected and tested before put into service? Understanding a bit about Crook county, maybe they were..,



I got a kick out of the comment in the article that the machines just
needed to be "calibrated".

Why does a voting machine require "calibration"?


My son in law was one of the voting machine "calibrators" and he says
you can pretty much move that touch area anywhere you want it to go.
The machines do give you a couple of chances to make sure the right
vote was registered but if you are careless and just keep hitting OK,
you could vote for the wrong guy.

The product that our company makes uses touch screen technology. Unlike something like an iPhone, the touch screens are usually a standard LCD flat panel monitor with an aftermarket touch sensitive overlay placed on top of it. The touch screens have to be calibrated so that when the image is displayed the touch panel "knows" where someone would be touching it to select that image (check box, up/down arrow, etc.). If it is accidentally or intentionally improperly calibrated, you could try to touch one thing and something else would activate, just like these voting machines are doing.

What is curious is that the machines being reported were all mis-calibrated in the same way... a touch for a republican registered a vote for a democrat. Pretty unlikely that happen by chance.