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Touch Screen Voting Industry Circling Wagons
bhoman writes "Salon has an interesting article/interview with the author of a forthcoming book, Black Box Voting, by Bev Harris, that looks at electronic voting machines, especially Diebold touchscreens. The story includes incriminating internal memos, cease and desist orders from Diebold, transcripts of an industry teleconference where Harris Miller of the ITAA brags of his lobbying experience, and documentation of a backdoor via an Access MDB with no password. This is for software currently being used in 37 states. "
It is the desparate grab of a disintegrating party of traitors . Facing oblivion, the DemocRats choose to plame the voting process.
... is for someone to hack a major election. By setting 100% of the vote to some obscure candidate, a very clear message about the validity and security of these voting machines will be made crystal clear. hmm... do they use these in California?
As a matter of fact, yes I *do* trust the government to count the ballots in Florida. They counted them once, and Bush won. They counted them a second time, and Bush still won. Furthermore, this whole myth that Bush lost the popular vote is a bunch of hogwash, since many states simply stopped counting votes once a sufficient victory margin was reached (lead > votes remaining). The goal is to reach a majority vote on the state level so votes can be counted on the electorate level; national counts are irrelevant to winning.
What people forget is that there is a "margin of error" in every election, sort of like a general adder that accounts for the inherhant dishonesty of the vote carriers & counters, and flaws in the voting material itself. For punchcard paper ballots, this works out to about 2.6% error.
That's normally a very good margin, when your candidates win by 15-20% victories, everyone looks the other way at the errors, because they don't matter. In close elections, that's when all the "dirty laundry" comes out, because each candidate needs to scrap together all the votes he or she can.
Many people are calling for a conversion to electronic recording systems, not realizing that there is error in these systems also. I've heard figures anywhere from 2 to 2.4% error, due to vote records "mysteriously" not delivered to be counted in the official ottals, plus interface errors leading to miscast votes. Then there's the issues in voting on "closed" systems -- some states have found voting machines that aren't even programmed correctly. Not exactly the end all solution there.
Then we have the California election on hold because opponents are calling for the installation of electronic balloting systems because a study shows votes will be miscounted... when a few days later, it turns out that the financial backers of the study are the electronic voting manufacturers... jeez, no impropriety here!
Finally, some sanity on this issue on /. of all places. No surprise somebody modded you troll. And I'm not a Bush fan. I don't agree with many of his policies and I think he is taking the country in the wrong direction, but I think he was a better choice than Bore.
Time to rant a little. I'm sure I'll get modded troll, but I've got karma to burn.
We've heard the "Bush lost the popular vote" mantra for years and years now. Borrowing a Clintonism, he didn't but even if he did, there's this little thing called the electoral college. Oh, you didn't learn about that in your socialist government school? I'll keep that in mind the next time they come poor-mouthing to me for their next levy (which goes to hire bureaucrats at the head shed and never makes it to the classroom, but I digress.)
The fact is, there is no problem with punch card ballots. They elected Gray-Out Davis and they can and will be used to recall him. I voted with the butterfly ballot for years and I would always check my ballot before leaving the polling place. And remember what Gore, et al, wanted - for the ballot to count if the intent of the voter can be ascertained from a dimple in the chad! How asinine!
Another thing you never hear - Bob Butterworth, the Florida attorney general, was Gore's Florida campaign manager. When the issue went to the Florida courts, did he back up Katherine Harris, as he was legally obliged to do? No, he wrote an amicus brief for the Gore campaign. That is like having an attorney represent you in a case and saying, "no, judge, my guy is wrong and should lose." In the real world, that usually equals swift disbarment.