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No Secret Ballot for Military Personnel?
belmolis writes "According to this editorial in today's New York Times, US military personnel for whom regular absentee ballot procedures are inconvenient are being provided with a questionable alternative, the Electronic Transmission Service, run by a private contractor, Omega Technologies. According to the NYT, the secrecy of ballots could be breached when they are faxed or emailed from the field, when they are in the hands of Omega Technologies, or when they are in the hands of local officials. The NYT was unable to obtain any information on security procedures from the company or from the Pentagon. A manual describing the system can be downloaded here [pdf document]. Like Diebold, Omega is far from non-partisan. Omega President and CEO Patricia Williams has donated $6,600 in this election cycle to the National Republican Congressional Committee and is a member of its Business Advisory Council."
Like anyone in the Military wants Kerry in control?
"I voted for the 87 Billion before I voted against it"
I willing to bet our military personel want flak jackets.
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
enough of you fools are voting for him anyway (according to a time poll)
you really get the "democracy" you deserve, the same one that brings you torture, poverty, corporate corruption, war, lies etc etc
so look forward to the draft, more war, more corruption, more human rights abuses, more lies
it seems you are fine with whats happen and you would like more of the same
USA voted the second greatest threat to world peace
Ahhh America. The land of the free is becoming more and more like a communist government everyday.
We are all screwed if that fool GW gets back in. The whole world will go to shit! More wars, more oppression and more abuse of human rights.
Yep, I'm sure his god loves him for that.
I suppose if the US wants democracy they should outsource the handling of elections to India- the world's largest democracy.
= UTF-8&q=malaysia+democracy">"lack" of democracy</a> in my country. But they're not really bothering about ensuring democracy in the US are they?
India had their elections this year, the then incumbent lost, but there were no significant riots - so I figure most Indians were satisfied with the results. Otherwise I'm sure heads will literally roll.
In contrast the US isn't doing too well- electronic voting machines designed for rigging. Negative vote counts, more votes than voters, etc. I mean even Saddam was careful to keep his votes between 0% and 100%.
Personally I think the US should execute all those involved in compromising the US elections. Execute them all for treason.
If the voting machines in the US are so easily tampered with, what sort of democracy does the US have? The irony is the Western Press likes to play up the <a href="http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie
I'd have thought that ensuring democracy in the world's most powerful nation would be quite important.
In my country, though the votes aren't anonymous, it seems we've got a better system. You vote marking an X on the desired box next to the candidate on piece of paper. The paper is inserted into a sealed ballot box. Once voting is done, the ballot boxes are all escorted by representatives of the opposition, observers, election officials to the counting stations. The boxes are opened and votes are counted by hand in clear view of everyone - the opposition included (if they bother to attend). The representatives get to see which box the X is in, or if some idiot voter doesn't know how to vote, or intentionally spoilt the vote.
Sure you can tamper with votes, but widescale tampering isn't going to be that easy.
In contrast, the US intended systems make tampering trivial.
Anonymous voting is not so important in civilized[1] countries.
Someone mentioned about the danger of bosses knowing who you vote for. Maybe in the US it's common for bosses/etc to care about who you vote for and so given the chance they'll go take the trouble to look up the votes of their employees.
But over here, most bosses seem to care a lot more about the bottomline. Maybe if you spend a lot of time sticking up political posters etc, the boss might be a bit concerned - coz it may affect your performance and thus the bottomline.
[1] Then again maybe it's too much to expect of the US?
Mahatma Gandhi when asked: "What do you think of Western Civilization?", he promptly replied: "I think it would be a good idea".
Of the 46,000 registered in both states, 68 percent are Democrats, 12 percent are Republicans and 16 percent didn't align themselves with a party, the newspaper reported on Sunday.
That's bad, but aren't those individual acts?
What we know for sure (see link below) is that the Republican Party rigged the 2000 election to allow the person who got fewer votes to take the White House.
Whether it was Florida's counting illegal military ballots, whether it was Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris' use of databases to prevent 90K+ Floridians from voting because they were "suspected" felons, whether it was the Supreme Court voting 5 to 4 to stop counting ballots when 2 justices out of the 5 voting to stop counting had close relatives (a son and wife!) working for the Bush campaign, it is crystal clear that the 2000 vote was cooked.
I'm not saying the Democrats are any better. But lots of retirees being registered to vote in two places does not show a conspiracy to rig the vote. It could be a case of many spacey elderly people forgetting where they're registered. The election in Florida in 2000 definitely shows that it was rigged in many ways.
And yet, when he does something like determine that removing political oppression in the Middle East is the best way to make the world safe from the potential of terrorists with WMD, it's the hard-core anti-W folks screaming "it's all for oil" or "it's a neo-con [read: Jewish] consipiracy to protect Israel" or "Bush lied".
I guess they must be seeing a different John Kerry than I am. Which wouldn't be surprising. How many John Kerrys are there, anyway? We know that there's at least two...
It's always weird to hear military folks praising Bush in contrast to say, Kerry.
I dearly want to know _why_ they support & respect a group of people who pulled every string they could to stay out of harm's way (while fully supporting sending _everyone else_), and yet have no respect for someone who actually volunteered for two tours of fairly hazardous duty in Vietnam & managed came back alive (and reasonably healthy). Can someone please rationalize this for me?
I can understand the whole action hero attitude the US military likes, but the guy seems to say he likes the military, then stabs it in the back some more. Don't they read about what Bush is doing to them? He's their commander-in-chief, but seems to hate them. So very, very strange.