It wouldn’t be a presidential election without some controversy.

In 2012, hanging chads have given way to possibly faulty touchscreen voting machines in Pennsylvania, where at least one voter says he tried to cast a vote to re-elect President Obama, but the machine switched his vote to one for Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

The machine in question has been taken offline, according to MSNBC, but that calls into question how many other machines in circulation are triggering the same issues and how many voters even bother to verify their votes before grabbing their “I Voted” stickers.

Watch the video for yourself and decide whether this is real or someone’s attempt to create the next viral video.

To be clear, this is not a partisan issue. MSNBC also reports the Republican National Committee last week sent a letter to elections officials in six other states, including Ohio, Nevada, and Colorado, raising concerns that machines had wrongly counted votes for Romney as ones for Obama, asking them to address the problem.

An interesting side note: Romney’s son, Tagg, is an investor in the company that produces the voting machine used in some battleground states, such as Ohio.

Florida, never one to miss an Election Day kerfuffle, has seen problems with absentee ballots and early voting again, but those issues appear to be more man-made than technology-based.

Regardless of your party affiliation or choice for the next president, it looks like everyone will have some second-guessing material after all the votes are counted. In this age of technology, though, shouldn’t these problems be a distant memory? Are old-time adding machines and manual counts more reliable than electronic ones?

About the author

D. Craig MacCormack

Craig MacCormack is a veteran journalist with more than 15 years experience covering local and national news and sports as well as architecture and engineering. He joined Commercial Integrator in January 2011. Follow him on Twitter: @CraigMacCormack.

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