Slashdot Mirror
The State of Electronic Voting in Georgia
An anonymous reader writes "The AJC is reporting on the current state of electronic voting in Georgia. The article discusses both sides of the debate and mentions Bev Harris and her work at Black Box Voting. Is touch screen voting the best solution available or is a conspiracy afoot?"
Atlanta Journal Constitution. (Atlanta is in Georgia... the state, not to nation state of Georgia.)
Sorry, AV. You keep karmawhoring, I keep pointing it out.
/. is a bit US-centric. But no, AV wants to curry your modpoints. He'd like you to believe that he thinks there's an Atlanta in the Republic of Georgia.
He isn't a professor. One of the institutions he claimed to teach at doesn't exist, the other doesn't show him on the faculty.
Note the asskiss technique: "And a fucking damn good one at that." Please. Even those of us who ARE American can tell that
AV, I hope that you've noticed that there's more than one of us. I'm not the only one to have noticed what a karma whore you are, and I'm not the only one who will continue to out you.
I spoke to Rep. Lewis about this issue at one of his "Meet and Greet" sessions several months ago. Contacting your representative *does* have an impact.
"In Georgia, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll shows Democratic Sen. Max Cleland with a 49%-to-44% lead over Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss."
Final Result
53 to 46 percent Chambliss
HOW ACCURATE?
Polls had Cleland winning by 2 and 5 points, he lost by 7
POST POLL SWING:
9 to 12 points towards Republican Party
ThHis is from an article on Scoop.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Read this article from the NYT.
There are many on slashdot who won't even register for nyt. Just read this and it will make you privacy panaroids cringe.
"This is a complicated business. Each party's databank has the name of every one of the 168 million or so registered voters in the country, cross-indexed with phone numbers, addresses, voting history, income range and so on -- up to as many as several hundred points of data on each voter. The information has been acquired from state voter-registration rolls, census reports, consumer data-mining companies and direct marketing vendors. The parties have also amassed detailed information about the political and social beliefs that you might have shared with canvassers who have phoned or knocked on the door over the past few years. While specifics vary, a typical voter profile like my own, for instance, would show my age, address, phone numbers; which elections I've voted in over the past 10 or 15 years and whether I've ever voted on an absentee ballot; and my e-mail address. It would include my New Jersey party registration (Democrat), whether I've ever made a political donation (none that I recall), my approximate income, my ethnicity, my marital status and the number of children living in my house. Thanks to the ready availability of subscriber lists, mortgage data and product warranty information, the parties might use records of the newspapers I read (this one), the computer I work on (a Macintosh), the men's-wear catalogs I receive (Brooks Brothers, Land's End) and the loan-to-value ratio of my home."
And you guys spew vitriol over website registrations? That's the least of your worries...
If there was a coup in Georgia's gov't, it would be ousting the Hillbillies FROM Atlanta. Atlanta and Savannah are about the only progressive areas of Georgia.
Of course, by the same token, most people here, in Georgia, where I am unfortunate enough to live, are too uneducated to hack a voting machine, so democracy is pretty much safe here.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The two advantages of e-Voting that I can see are: votes can be counted more quickly and e-voting systems don't involve humans at the counting stage so in a perfect system errors can't be introduced deliberately or accidently.
Ok, I'll grant those as two advantages. So why not have machine-readable paper ballots? We used them in the Toronto municipal election. Fill in the bubble for your candidate (with a Sharpie), feed into the optical scanner and watch your ballot drop into the big, transparent plexiglass box behind it. You get all of the advantages of the touch screen machines, and all of the auditability and trust of paper.
This one REALLY seems like a no-brainer.
In Soviet Russia, sig types you!
I am an election judge for the upcoming primary in MD, and we had to take a class on our new electronic voting machines, made by Diebold. Unlike the system described in the article, the ballots themselves are not encoded with the ballots, simply the party of the person voting. If your card has bits set the certain way, your ballot will pop-up for which ever party is encoded on the card. The only problems are when the card operator punches in the wrong party, then I would have to go over to the machine and cancel the ballot.
The only problems with the system that I can see are human. If you work with another election judge and, for instance, encode the wrong cards repeatedly for the other party and don't cancel the ballots, but submit them, then you can tamper the vote. The same thing could happen with a paper system, but admittedly it is harder and slower to cast lots of fake ballots.
In the end, it's up to the election judges and the local board of elections to make sure every vote counts, just as it would be with a paper system.
Two places which have details on arguments against the current state-of-the-art of electronic voting are verifiedvoting.org and Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The first line says most of the story:
The other part of the story is that the software produces a paper ballot that can be read by both the voters and by machine.
The ballot-producing machine itself can be touch screen - or something else for use by physically impaired voters.
The system is a) inexpensive, b) voter verifiable, c) adaptable to the needs of voters with physical impairments and d) open source.
Ok, so I was mistaken. On the other hand I saw polls before the election which showed President Bush blowing out Al Gore, au contraire the race was close. I guess I should go whine about vote fraud eh?