Alaska: Florida 2000 Redux

The good news: After Alaska decided to actually COUNT 90,000 absentee and questioned votes, Anchorage mayor Mark Begich now leads convicted felon Ted Stevens in the Alaska Senate race.

If you look here, you can see that aside from the few districts that use paper ballots, much of Alaska uses two voting machines: the Accu-Vote OS and the Accu-Vote TSX, both made by "Premier Election Solutions", otherwise known as "Diebold." And when you click the above link and note the title of the page displayed in your browser, you'll see that it reads, GEMS Election Results. For those of us who have been sniffing around the disaster that is the American voting apparatus, the word GEMS is like putting garlic in front of a vampire -- it makes us recoil in horror.

This paper, published in 2007, details the inadequacy of the GEMS database for storing votes. It's an interesting paper to read if you're at all interested in database design, but the really useful part of this paper is its confirmation that "Premier Election Solutions" is still using what is essentially Access databases to store your votes, if you live in a state that uses these machines. To anyone in IT, this is at best laughable and at worst horrifying.

When I started my last job in 2000, the department had just built a new version of its clinical system. The old version was written entirely with Access, which essentially takes the same JET database engine that also runs Diebold voting machines, and marries it to a GUI and a version of Visual Basic to allow for relatively easy development of desktop applications for storing data. The new version used a server-based SQL Server database, which is what you use when you need to store large amounts of data, because Access/JET is just not up to the task.

If you want to, say, store and categorize your recipes, or if you have a small petsitting business, Access is more than adequate for your purposes. If Not-Joe the Not-a-Plumber were actually buying that $250,000-generating plumbing business, he could probably use an Access database. But for a large business, or a situation in which many voters are casting many votes at the same time, Access/Jet is woefully inadequate. Any company that develops a large, mission-critical application using Access databases ought to be laughed right out of business. But all across the country, and right now in this focus-on-Alaska moment, we have a convicted felon who was "re-elected" by a population using voting machines that use Microsoft
a desktop database application YOU can buy at Amazon.com for $189.99.

Of the 90,000+ additional votes that hadn't been counted as of election night, over 60,000 of them are absentee ballots postmarked by midnight on November 4 and just over 20,000 being provisional ballots. (The rest are from early voting.) We should thank the goddess profoundly that this is the case, rather than it being the other way around. Because somehow, if Mark Begich prevails and the vote is within the 1/2 of one percent that would trigger an automatic recount, suddenly Republican males dreaming of six years of jerking off to images of Caribou Barbie on the floor of the Senate will magically discover the shortcomings of the GEMS database.

Look for Joe the Plumber to be leading the vote count riot this time.

UPDATE: Looks like Republicans have suddenly decided that the possibility of inaccurate vote counts is a problem after all -- but only when their seats are threatened by a sketch comic. Too bad for them that Minnesota has a truly verifiable paper trail that allows a manual recount reflecting the actual vote. I wonder if this sudden concern means they're willing to declare George W. Bush's presidency illegitimate? My guess is that right about now they are, and it seems that Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh already have decided that the last eight years never happened.

(For the record: We here at Brilliant at Breakfast believe that every vote should be counted and the will of the people respected. Even when that means Republicans don't prevail.)