Slashdot Mirror
Maryland Governor Wants Paper Ballots
supabeast! writes, "Fed up with all the problems in the state's electronic voting system, Maryland Governor Robert Erlich wants the state to scrap the entire system and return to paper ballots. He's threatened to call a special session of the legislature to change the law to allow paper ballots. What makes this particularly interesting is that Erlich is a Republican — the party often maligned for exploiting flaws in electronic systems — and his attempts to clean up Maryland's voting problems are being opposed by Democrats, the party that is usually complaining about electronic voting!"
It's pretty obvious that Erlich is taking advantage of the situation to turn it into a partisan issue by making the Democrats in charge of elections look bad, and to make himself look like a saint. The irony is that he previously poo-poo'd problems with Diebold machines in the Ohio 2004 presidential elections, while it was politically favorable for him to do so.
The intro slashdot blurb is also entirely misleading, because there's not a contingent of the Democratic Party against using paper ballots, in fact the article only mentions the two prominent Democratic members of the elections committee that are resisting, primarily because it's their own jobs that are being criticized by Erlich.
So make no mistake, this is ENTIRELY POLITICAL, Erlich is taking advantage of a political opportunity presented by the fuckups of two prominent Democrats, and trying to paint himself as pro-fair-elections and them as obstructionist in one sweep. Politically a smart thing to do, also somewhat misleading. Amazing to see how many slashdotters take politicians words at their face values.
make world, not war
Electronic voting can go smoothly, though. Look at India's last major election. 600+ million voters. All electronic. The election took three weeks. They had federally governed voting machines. The US, by contrast, allows each state to dictate which machine or method they utilize under few federal standards. The machines in India were verified prior to the election and subject to a rigerous, open process of testing. They went through dozens of public tests to ensure that the machines could be used by the largely illiterate rural communities and that even skilled or determined people were unable to bias a machine. The machines were cheap and nearly dispoable, each only holding a few thousand votes at the most. By contrast, many US electronic systems collect votes together. A compromised or disabled setup in a precinct could put tens of thousands of votes at risk.
No large cries of fraud (IIRC there were a few localized incidents that were more human error than machine/trust errors). It went smoothly.
Unfortunately, the election business in the US is far too much money to go that well. When states start offering contracts in the tens of millions of dollars for "voting equipment" and "election consulting", you're just asking for problems.
That's what wedge issues are for: They are issues people have deep emotional feelings about, no one is ever going to change their minds about them, and nothing substantial will ever get done about them. Every election cycle, the politicos in Washington start banging the drum about a selection of wedge issues, get everyone into a frenzy about them, and drop shortly after the election.
You rarely see any politicians talking abortion, gun control, or flag burning in odd-numbered years.
Actually, the current Mayor of Chicago is named Daley. You found his father who gave JFK Chicago in 1960 which some say is why JFK flew to Nixon rather than vice versa.
There was a question as to whether votes for Kerry were on machines before the polls opened in 2004. If you've been in this city you know that Unions only protect one ticket and either scare or beat up the other.
Philadelphia has a lot of things - a two party system isn't one of them.
What's most amusing about Democrat charges is that they try to blame Governor's or the Federal system whereas vote control occurs at the local level.
(And I won't even get into the NJSC replacing Torch with Lautenberg.)
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Yeah exactly. The brief blurb, obviously written by an outsider of MD politics, overlooks the fact that Erhlich was championing the machines 2 years ago, and was pushing everyone to spend a great deal of money updating the machines.
Now that the money is spent, he says we should use a paper system, throwing away what we have. The democrats are saying "hey, idiot, we already spent the money, let's make it work since you were so gung-ho for it."
So if we're talking about flipped political personalities, the Republican is a flip flopper, and the democrats are fiscally responsible!