Florida Ruling May Lead To E-voting Paper Trail

dorkus123 points out this Palm Beach Post story which begins "An administrative law judge over-ruled an administrative decision Friday that the 15 counties that use touch-screen voting systems must be able to perform manual recounts in extremely close elections." Prior to this, counties using touch-screen voting were exempt from a requirement requiring that certified voting machines be amenable to manual recounts. wierzpio adds a link to the AP's similar story.

Comments

bull

[schneidafunk]

But a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood said, "This ruling takes Florida back to 2000," of course a paper trail takes us back to 2000 where we could actually recount the votes...

what we want is a system different than 2000, where we can steal the election without anyone knowing.

Re:bull

[vsprintf]

If the correct count is close (i.e. a human would be likely to get it wrong), then we bring in the humans to add error. So yeah, stealing the election...but not by the machines.

During the 2000 election, the Diebold machines in Florida's Volusia County returned negative 16,022 votes for one candidate. Obviously those infallible machines were right, and we wouldn't want to introduce human error by having a recount.

Florida, home of fair elections...

[WIAKywbfatw]

Where people get turned away from voting stations by police, disenfranchised because they share the same name as people who were previously convicted of crimes in other US states, have to put up with butterfly ballot papers (only in the poorest districts though) and where chads reign supreme.

What makes anyone think that Florida will get in right this time?

Keep it simple

[leathered]

Give paper ballot to voter.
Voter makes mark next to chosen candidate.
Voter places ballot in ballot box.
Count ballots in the presense of the candidates.

Here in the UK this system has worked without incident for several hundred years. Any other way opens up the system to irregularities, be they accidental or malicious.

From the AP story:

[mrchaotica]

Administrative Law Judge Susan Kirkland agreed, writing state law clearly contemplates "that manual recounts will be done on each certified voting system, including the touchscreen voting systems."

With a primary election Tuesday and more than one-half the state's voters in counties that use touchscreens, it is not clear what those counties will do.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the incredible stupidity!

Also:

But Vicki Cannon, the supervisor of elections in rural Nassau County, north of Jacksonville, said she could do a hand recount of touchscreen votes if the election were close enough to require it.

"Certainly we could if the state directed us to," Cannon said.

"I would assume that we would print our ballot records, and count the candidates' names. Time-consuming, maybe. Difficult? I don't think so."

**Beats head against wall** Don't they realize that this defeats the entire point of the paper trail?! It needs to print as the vote is cast, so that the voter can verify it. By the time they print it out afterwards, it can already be changed!

Re:Paper receipt?

[the pickle]

It *isn't* difficult to implement such a system.

Diebold doesn't want to, because it's too much trouble to recall all the (election-stealing) machines they already have in place and equip them for printing. <Conspiracy Theory>Or their CEO doesn't want to because he promised Ohio's votes to Bush this year, and he wants to keep that promise.</Conspiracy>

The people who keep suggesting an electronic voting machine work exactly as a fill-in-the-circle paper voting machine are EXACTLY on the right track. Without such human-readable PAPER ballots, electronic voting will never be safe. There absolutely has to be a paper backup to the electronic voting.

p

The articles miss the big point -- deliberately?

[intnsred]

The articles both argue over the reliabililty of computer ballot counts, paper trails, and the fiction of "hanging chads" and error-proned human counts.

This is the corporate media version of what happened in Florida. It deliberately misses the big picture.

What about the fact that Jeb Bush deliberately removed tens of thousands of "supposed" felons (who were 90%+ Democratic voters; he's trying it again this year but is meeting more criticism)? What about the counting of absentee military ballots which violated Florida law? What about the findings by the federal gov't that there was deliberate denials of voting rights to many Flordians? This included false information about voting places/times, closing roads, excessive police presence at selected voting precints.

I'm all for a paper ballot trail and audited code for voting machines and a clear oversight process. But the sham election in 2000 (see link below) was far more deliberate than just an issue of "hanging chads" -- and those issues are completely ignored.

International observers to monitor US elections

[MSBob]

One of the most interesting developments in this election campaign that was completely "overlooked" by mainstream US media is the fact that for the first time in history, US presidential elections will be monitored by international observes.

How did America get to the point where the fear of rigged elections (normally something reserved for so called "rogue states") is so real that many feel the neat to bring in overseers from abroad? Is it really ture that you always become what you hate?