Jason was right in predicting that elections in Fairfax County were handed over to an electronic system that failed because officials didn’t understand it well enough. Turns out that yesterday’s voting was marred by glitches:
The new machines, meant to simplify voting, made the tallying of the votes more problematic. More than half of precinct officials resorted to the old-fashioned telephone to call in their numbers or even drove the results to headquarters, elections officials said. A handful of precincts went back to paper ballots.
County elections officials said it was the slowest performance in memory for counting votes on election night. The problem came when precinct workers tried to electronically send results from the 953 new machines to election headquarters, unexpectedly overloading computer servers.
From today’s Washington Post.