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Labor's tech partner accepts blame for failed primary By Ofri Ilani, Haaretz Correspondent Tags: Labor Party, Israel News  Taldor, the company responsible for the Labor Party's computerized election system, admitted Tuesday that unexpected problems occurred. "We regret that unexpected faults in the operation of the computerized voting system occurred today, including communications and operational faults," the company said. "Taldor accepted today's decision by the Labor Party to stop the computerized primary. Taldor will support the Labor Party in holding the primary with paper ballots on the date they decided." Last year, Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit announced that Israel had to act to computerize its general elections. "There is no need to transport people to voting stations and there is no need to set up so many voting booths. It is possible to have immediate results, without the long and expensive hand-counting [of ballots]," Sheetrit said. Advertisement The idea of computerizing elections was raised again when the upcoming Knesset elections were announced. Some MKs said there was no reason to hold a long and complex election campaign when it was possible to hold a quick computerized vote. The Labor Party was worried about computerized voting even before the primary. Its local branches had a hard time explaining to party members how to vote, even though such digital voting has been used for years around the world. In Israel, Likud has already held a computerized primary, though in a somewhat different form than Labor. Even though such a process is supposed to be quick and efficient, the system is more susceptible to problems. A main principle of an election is to make it as simple as possible. The more complex the process, the greater the risk of problems. As to digital voting, every bug or system failure can alter the results. One of the worst cases came in Florida during the 2000 U.S. presidential election. A number of counties used computerized voting systems, but not all went smoothly. Al Gore's supporters say such failures were among the causes of his loss to George W. Bush. In a local election in Iowa in 2003, more than 140,000 votes were recorded, even though the district had only 50,000 people. It's bad when a fault hurts only one candidate, but even worse if hackers were to shut down the entire system. Related articles: Labor sets primary for tomorrow after computer failure Glitch won't keep oldest Laborite from casting ballot Labor's fiasco / The party defeated itself Bookmark to del.icio.us   Light unto the nations Obama must help Israel break its territorial addiction. Blockade busters Israeli Arab leaders vow to sail to Gaza to break blockade.   1.   Machine Was Not Designed for Negative Vote Counts 05:39  |  Baruch Gold 03/12/08

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