computers make things worse...

Yahoo! News - 7,000 Orange County Voters Were Given Bad Ballots



Orange County election officials have traced the problem to poll workers who were responsible for giving each voter a four-digit code to enter into the voting machines.



After signing in, each voter received a ticket bearing his or her precinct number and party affiliation from a poll worker. The voter would take the ticket to a second worker, who was supposed to scroll through a computer screen and use the voter's precinct and political party to select an access code that would identify the appropriate ballot. Several workers who handled this stage of the process - including some who said they didn't know more than one precinct had been assigned to their polling place - gave voters codes for the wrong precincts, causing the wrong ballots to appear on their screens.



Some voters noticed the problem and were able to get workers to give them access codes for the proper ballots. But many voters did not. The result was that turnout figures in some precincts were pushed artificially - even impossibly - high, while turnout figures for neighboring precincts that voted at the same polling place were artificially low.