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Nov 07 2012
Management

How Technology Performed on Election Day

States attempt to maintain voting secure throughout the 2012 presidential election.
by

Anita Ferrer is a contributor to the CDW family of technology magazine sites.

When New Jersey announced it would allow voters affected by Hurricane Sandy to cast their votes via e-mail, experts were concerned about the security implications.

During the election, New Jersey’s e-mail voting plan hit a bump in the road when email inboxes began to overflow with votes. According to BuzzFeed, voters from Morris County and Essex County, two of the state’s biggest counties, were unable to cast their ballots. The Essex County clerk even resorted to using his personal Hotmail account to receive votes.

Voters gave their two cents via Twitter while the state attempted to fix the issues on their end by extending the voting deadline.

Displaced New York City voters suffered long lines and tech pushbacks. Most voting precincts used the old-school method of paper ballots and scanners, if they had any.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania was in chaos, after a voter took a video of the machine changing his vote from Barack Obama to Mitt Romney. The video later went viral on Reddit and other social networks. The faulty machine was removed.

A similar situation in Ohio led to a lawsuit requesting that some machines be removed from polling places before the day was over. However, a federal judge rejected the move, finding that the system was safe, since it did not have the capability to change election results stored in the software.

How did your technology fare on election day? Let us know in the Comments section below.

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