New Mexico Touchscreen Voting Problems

phr1 writes "The Albuquerque Journal reports yet more hassles with electronic voting machines. Early voters pressing the Kerry button have repeatedly found the machine instead putting a check mark next to 'Bush'. The operators of course say it's the voters' fault. It would be just too unfortunate if the machines happened to systematically favor one candidate over the other, heh, heh."

Comments

So...

[HarryCaul]

Does this expert political analyst know what state ABQ is in?

Non-partisan election commissions

[lothar97]

The problem: we're the only Western democracy that allows for partisan election commissions. We get people in charge of state voting oversight also being chair of the state campaign for a candidate- Katherine Harris comes to mind. Sure she's allowed to have her political views outside of her job, but when she decided who won Florida in 2000, she was also chair of the Bush campaign in Florida. There is something fundamentally wrong with this. I don't have examples now, but I know the Dems have pulled crap like this as well.

What we need is non-partisan, or better, multi-partisan, voting commissions. Bring in a Dem, a Repub, and throw in a 3rd party person every now and then. It will give a better air of legitimacy to the circus we call elelection.

Re:Non-partisan election commissions

[xlv]

60 minutes had a pretty good piece this evening on how the Congress and the Pentagon are screwing the soldiers in Iraq...

Thanks for the info. As I'm on the West Coast, it's just starting now...

On the same subject, I've recently seen some 3 part documentary on Discovery/NY Times following a guard unit from their prewar training to the actual stay in Iraq and they were showing similar pictures of soldiers adding rusted plates over their Humvees doors. Whatever you think of the war, when you see that, you have to feel sorry for those guys...

Re:phr1: Idiot or troll?

[St. Arbirix]

Read between the lines in the article. The only people they interviewer were voting Kerry. The only person defending the machines was also the only one saying it affected both sides. The article either:

1) Couldn't find any Bush voters (which is interesting since New Mexico has just as many Republicans as Democrats)

or

2) Let the only comments about Republicans come from the woman who is already in suspicion of tampering with the votes, so that you'll make mental associations between the concepts of "tampered votes" and "Republicans". Subtle propaganda, I love it.

Re:Go Boston Tea Party on em

[xlv]

Myself, I have no idea if I can refuse to use the machines on election day.

I believe I've seen on the news or some political web site (it might even have been on another discussion here about electronic voting) that you're allowed to refuse to use electronic machines and that each voting place is supposed to have paper ballots. When I saw that, the controversy was that poll workers were instructed not to mention that fact when greeting voters.

IMPORTANT: READ THIS and TAKE ACTION

[goombah99]

New mexico, despite being small, may well be the 2nd most important state in the nation on the electronic voting issue. (california being the first with its financial clout). The reason New Mexico is so critical is that the head of NASED is also the election director. NASED is the shell organization formed by the vendor lobby org electioncenter.org to rubber stamp the approval of all voting machines. When some one says a machine is "federally certified" this is a polite fiction: there is no federal certification process, there are only voluntary guidelines and if a machine meets these guidelines as discerened by a private contractor (wyles testing, Cyber, or Systest are the only three) then NASED gives it a gold star. Thes guidelines are woefully inadequate and test more for whether the machine will catch fire than if its follows proper coding practices (e.g. dont use floats for the vote total, or allow negative vote numbers (as happened in the bit-flip error that created -16,324 votes for al gore in florida).

That's what "federally certified means". NADA. And denise lamb is the one who does this to you (denise.lamb@state.nm.us).

Denise is a rabid, machines-can-do-no-wrong political animal, logig means nothing to her, so lying to achive an agenda is simply machivelian to her. In fact she makes up lies about the machines and tells people for example that all paper trails would be printed on 1.5 inch wide ribbons of tissue paper. (no I'm not making this up, I've saw her demo before the ACLU.).

If that were not enough, we have a Secretary of state, Rebecca Vigil-Giron who if you look on "followthemoney,org" you will see takes not only corporate donations from vendors but also personal ones. She is also head of the NAtional association of secretaries of state and issues policy reccomendations to all the others SOS. About half of her $500,000 budget comes in "gifts" from machine vendors.

So you can see that if New Mexico has a problem then the whole united states has a problem

I urge you to write Denise Lamb denise.lamb@state.nm.us and tell her you are a professional programmer and give her your candid opinion. And while you are at it ask her to mail you one of those noodle voting tapes she had made up--she hands out copies.