We Told You This Would Happen, Dammit

We really did, you know. So did lots of other people. From the WaPo, breaking news on broken elections:

Election Day in Montgomery County and parts of Prince George's opened in chaos and frustration this morning, as a series of problems and missteps left thousands of citizens unable to vote or forced to cast provisional ballots.

[snip]Montgomery County's Board of Elections held an emergency meeting and agreed to petition the Circuit Court to extend voting times until 9 p.m.

No electronic voting machines were operational when polls opened at 7 a.m. in Montgomery County, because election officials failed to deliver the required voter authorization cards to the county's 238 precincts. Voters were supposed to be given provisional paper ballots instead. But several precincts quickly ran out of those backup ballots.

LambMaster Kos is running with this hard so check there for closer-to-realtime updates than we can provide. He says at this point (11:30 a.m. CDT 9-12-06)

The only solution, at this point, is to have a do-over. I can't believe people are still using these frackin' machines. I can't believe people trust elections to a machine which uses the Windows operating system.

Did we not tell them they shoulda got Macs?

(Okay, actually I should let Lambert take over at this point so he can preach from the Book of Linux, but I do not go to that church so can't comment on it.) But this is a disaster that really has nothing to do with OS's or e-insecurity, just old fashioned fuckupery. "election officials failed to deliver the required voter authorization cards to the county's 238 precincts"??

Bodes real well for the security of the whole process right there, doncha think?