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NYT Says Paperless Voting A Serious Problem
joshdick writes "In an editorial today, the NYTimes comes out strongly in favor of a paper trail for all elections, supporting a recent lobbying effort by Common Cause and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to pass H.R. 550. 'Electronic voting has been rolled out nationwide without necessary safeguards. The machines' computers can be programmed to steal votes from one candidate and give them to another. There are also many ways hackers can break in to tamper with the count. Polls show that many Americans do not trust electronic voting in its current form; such doubts are a serious problem in a democracy.'"
The link to H.R. 550 is broken in the summary, but it can be seen here.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Diebold was also a major bush campaign contributer...
Here's three links that support the parent:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0828-08.h
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/Diebolds_politica
http://www.boalt.org/biplog/archive/000546.html
If you disagree with the parent, be a man and argue the point with him. Don't mod him as 'flamebait' merely because what he says makes you feel uncomfortable.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Wasn't it Diebolds CEO that said he would do anything to make sure George W. Bush would win Ohio.
Yes, and here's the link.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
why did they suddenly begin making machines that had absolutely NO paper trail?
The initial reason was that they didn't make the machines. Diebold got into the voting machine business by buying Global Election Systems in January of 2002. So, throughout 2002 when they began their marketing effort, they were actually selling software and hardware that they didn't design.
So the answer to your question is... they didn't want to invest in re-engineering.
That may not have been the only reason, of course, and it always seemed to me that they protested too much. When customers began to demand a paper trail, why did they hold out so long? But there may not have been any ill intent. Per Hanlon's Razor, I prefer to presume incompetence rather than malice.
In any case, they now offer machines with a voter-verifiable paper trail. At least, that's what my state has supposedly decided to purchase from them. The news reports made a big deal about the paper trail.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The voter does NOT take the paper with him.
The paper is so the voter can verify who the machine says he voted for.
Then the paper vote is dropped in a sealed box.
If there is any question about anything, the paper ballots in the box are compared to the electronic record of the machine.
The voter does NOT take the paper with him.
I'm in Canada and have voted every opportunity I've had....I don't get why voting seems to be so difficult in other so called democracies. What's the deal with punching holes in ballots, using machines, etc, etc.... The way we do it here is a person hands you a piece of paper with the candidates names on it, they cross your name off a list, you mark an X beside the one you want, and you drop it in a box. Later on someone counts up the votes. I've never even had to wait in line to vote once...then again I go in the middle of the day while everyone's at work...but even when busy the lines are no longer than a 5 minute wait.
Quick answer: the printed paper is shown to the voter before final casting for a visual confirmation check (make sure it says who they really voted for). After the voter confirms the paper receipt is cut off and falls into a big box of identical pieces of paper. No one can count backwards to see who voted for who.
The article, from the Cleveland Plain Dealer begins with this quote:
There is no proof that any improprieties were committed, but the suggestion that the head of the company that makes vote-counting machines should not be making such biased comments in public is hardly a radical one.
Here's an idea - maybe the person who runs the company making vote-counting machines should be making public statements about how he's "committed to ensuring that the machines deliver an accurate count of the vote tallies", instead of such blatant political posturing.
No, O'Dell never made any public statements that he would engage in election fraud, but he did say that he was committed to helping deliver Ohio's Electoral votes to Bush. That is a bit more specific than saying he wanted to help Bush win in Ohio, and it is mostly the particular wording used that caused the uproar.
I am not saying that I think he knowingly engaged in election fraud (considering that Blackwell was both the Sec. of State of Ohio and the co-chair of the Bush/Cheney campaign in Ohio, and he did more than his share of election "fixing", it's not like O'Dell needed to), but I am saying that having the head of the company pushing for a particular result could be perceived as encouraging underlings to take that as a more important goal than accuracy.
It's just a bad idea for people involved in vote-counting to have an obvious political agenda that could be perceived as being more important with their professional impartiality. I believe that harms the people's confidence in our electoral system, and by extension, harms our democracy,
Read Preserving Democracy - What Went Wrong in Ohio. " "We have found numerous, serious election irregularities . . . which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters. . . . "In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio."
Think about that for a moment. The person in charge of vote counting in Ohio was also running the Bush campaign.