Slashdot Mirror
Domain: chicagoelections.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to chicagoelections.com.
Comments · 6
-
Re:Perish the thought.
Nothing was shown conclusively, but it sure is fun to dredge up old innuendo. How about this one? In Chicago (Bill Daley's hometown), which used the same machines that Daley condemned so vociferously in Florida and which have shown to have a voter error rate of several percent (people carelessly voting for someone other than the intended candidate) in nine of fifty Wards the Republicans got less than 2% of the vote, and in many precincts, it was 0% which is statistically very unlikely. But we all know that Chicagoans are simply more careful than the rest of the nation.
-
Re:Perish the thought.
Nothing was shown conclusively, but it sure is fun to dredge up old innuendo. How about this one? In Chicago (Bill Daley's hometown), which used the same machines that Daley condemned so vociferously in Florida and which have shown to have a voter error rate of several percent (people carelessly voting for someone other than the intended candidate) in nine of fifty Wards the Republicans got less than 2% of the vote, and in many precincts, it was 0% which is statistically very unlikely. But we all know that Chicagoans are simply more careful than the rest of the nation.
-
Re:Optical scan ballotsSo, the old and "stupid should not be allowed to vote? What's your position on Jews and Catholics being allowed to vote? No, PEOPLE (old, stupid, or otherwise) shouldn't prevent OTHER PEOPLE from voting. It's better to disenfranchise a small number of people rather than risk the integrity of the entire vote. You're arguing for a solution that makes the system integrity lower and less reliable in general to accommodate a handful of stupid people. You seem to think that our Chicago ballots are like those #2 pencil answer sheets we used in school. If you look at http://chicagoelections.com/docs/ballots/387d.pdf you will see that our ballot has the names already on it. The voter completes the arrow pointing to their choice. This paper is then pushed into the scanner, and drops into a sealed box. I have used similar equipment extensively. This is EXACTLY this type of equipment I was talking about. The paper ballots and the scanner memory chip are returned to the collection station in sealed packages after the polls close. The memory chip is a "black box". There is no way to know what it's actually recording without using elaborate test equipment that won't be available 99.9% of the time. We get the convenience of rapid results from a perfectly hand-verifiable paper record. Except this never happens. In practice, recounts amount to "rescans" wherein the same ballots are scanned again. IN PRACTICE, they are never hand read. Removing the OPTION of machine counting is the only way to insure hand counting actually takes place. You might ask why we need the scanner. Some of our elections have 96 different names on the ballot, when you add in judicial elections and other races. Hand counting would take all night, So what? People don't take office the next day. As numerous other posters have pointed out, most other industrialized countries use handcounted ballots and the delay doesn't seem to cause any significant problems. and far more liable to fakery. All evidence seems to support the idea that hand counts in front of multiparty observers is the method LEAST susceptible to undetectable tampering. there is still no evidence that any electronic votes have been tampered with. Bullshit. Pretty much without exception handcounts of receipts generated by touchscreen machines have revealed massive discrepancies. This is why state after state is tossing out touchscreen machines. There is strong evidence that some of this was deliberate tampering. Nobody has gone to jail yet, but that doesn't mean it hasn't happened.
There are a number of cases of optical scan systems being tampered with. People HAVE gone to jail for this.
Of course, there are a lot more cases of people tampering with hand marked ballots (both domestically and internationally).
If you're smart, this should tell you something about how easy it is to detect tampering in different systems. -
Re:Optical scan ballotsSo, the old and "stupid should not be allowed to vote? What's your position on Jews and Catholics being allowed to vote?
I am not defending stupidity, but rather the fact that all humans make mistakes. Including you. You seem to think that our Chicago ballots are like those #2 pencil answer sheets we used in school. If you look at http://chicagoelections.com/docs/ballots/387d.pdf you will see that our ballot has the names already on it. The voter completes the arrow pointing to their choice. This paper is then pushed into the scanner, and drops into a sealed box. The paper ballots and the scanner memory chip are returned to the collection station in sealed packages after the polls close. We get the convenience of rapid results from a perfectly hand-verifiable paper record.
You might ask why we need the scanner. Some of our elections have 96 different names on the ballot, when you add in judicial elections and other races. Hand counting would take all night, and far more liable to fakery.
Actually I'm a bit surprised you oppose strong ID laws. How will you know if a voter is too old to meet your standards without a date of birth?
As to the mistake vs. tampering issue, there is still no evidence that any electronic votes have been tampered with. Most of the evidence is that maybe it could be done, and that exit polls conducted by college students hanging out all election day in Starbuck's didn't match expectations. Now contrast with the notorius 2000 Florida vote, which was amazingly close, so much so that the hanging chad case became critical. Your breezy dismissal of the mistake issue sets us up for another debacle. Disenfanchising those who don't meet your standards seems like a poor way to promote democracy.
-
Re:Thank God
The new Chicago touchscreen voting machines in 2006 log your votes to a paper tape that rolls through a glass/plastic window that you can see and verify your votes before you submit them. When you approve your selections, the paper winds your votes up on a spool to hide your selections from the next voter. You can choose to "spoil" your ballot and start over if it doesn't look right.
Donate to the Steven Heller Defence Fund.
-
Reasons to Keep the Electoral College
The Electoral College -- or, more precisely, an electoral system where each State has a given number of votes for president -- does have at least one major advantage in a close election. It serves to contain disputes and demands for recounts and actually makes it easier to determine the winner; it serves as a buffer that protects against a Florida fiasco on the national level.
Nationally, out of the 98,303,931 votes cast (and unofficially counted so far) for the two major-party candidates, Gore leads Bush by only 216,291 votes, a fraction of one percent. (You can get these numbers from any number of places; I've taken them from http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/poli tic s/.)
If it weren't for the Electoral College, I think you'd be seeing challenges to the results and demands for recounts or revotes even in those areas where everyone agrees that one candidate or the other won comfortably. In Chicago, for example, Gore got 769317 votes to Bush's 164919 (http://www.chicagoelecti ons
Of course this doesn't necessarily mean that the Electoral College should be retained in its present form, but it certainly does suggest that we shouldn't be so quick to discard the balance it provides between national and federal elements in the American system of electing presidents.