Rule 1: Stuff Happens
Ten-year-lifetime lithium batteries and unbreakable LEDs have largely vanquished the dead-flashlight problem, but in general, equipment you don't use regularly probably won't work when you need it. A cell phone left untouched for a month has a dead battery, your house has at least one problem after a long vacation, and your snow tires always need air after Thanksgiving.
The Cuyahoga poll workers tried to get their jobs done under difficult conditions, but sometimes their efforts to cope only made things worse. The Diebold response to the Report summarizes one situation:
Poll workers in various locations apparently pulled memory cards from one touch screen unit and placed that memory card into another touch screen unit. However, they did not also remove the respective VVPAT [Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail] paper tape and place it into the second unit. Clearly, removing a memory card from one unit and placing it into another without also relocating the VVPAT records will account for a discrepancy when those results are compared.
That may be obvious in retrospect, but the situation was more complex. Although the memory cards contain the entire voting record for a particular machine, some DRE units were not marked with a number that corresponded to the memory card. Some cards were moved when that error was discovered, others were moved from one failed machine to another, and still others were lost, replaced, found, and then swapped back in, all to get enough machines working on Election Day.
Pop Quiz: What do you do when a USB Flash drive doesn't work?
Most likely, you'll try it in another port, then on another machine, to see if things improve. What if plugging a memory card into the wrong system invalidated its contents or wiped out the system, but only under certain circumstances? Would you remember that in the heat of the crisis, early on Election Day morning, with lines of voters wondering what's wrong with you?
The VVPAT paper tape isn't readily portable from one machine to another, particularly in mid-roll, and as nearly as I can tell, you'd have to dismantle the printer to extract the complete tape. Tearing the audit trail tape in mid-election probably isn't covered in the procedures and could run afoul of election rules.
A number of DRE units crashed, froze, or malfunctioned during boot-up or use on Election Day, an unknown number of which were returned to service without further investigation.
Each debugging decision and ad-hoc workaround makes sense at the time, can be criticized based on a lack of overall system knowledge, and is the sort of thing that anyone would do to solve the immediate problem without considering its overall effect.
The election officials did provide a voluminous manual. Alas, [t]he final manual provided for use on Election Day contained substantial errors which affected Booth Official's ability to set up and configure voting machines. Anyone who has created documentation can sympathize, but that's little consolation.
Poll workers, being volunteers, also tend to be both highly motivated and dedicated. It's unreasonable to expect them to not fix whatever gets in the way of doing their jobs; indeed, you couldn't ask for better employees.
The trick is ensuring that the rest of the system can keep up with them, even in the face of unexpected failures and the inevitable confusion of real life. Fielding a system that works perfectly under laboratory conditions isn't acceptable; it must also work when used by people who don't understand all its undocumented nuances and take sensible, if sometimes counterproductive, action when (they think it's) needed.
