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A Flawed US Election Reform Bill
H.R.811 sounds great: It's stated purpose is "to require a voter-verified permanent paper ballot." Unfortunately, it sounds like the details have some devils, as usual. From the Bev Harris article Is a flawed bill better than no bill?: "[T]he Holt Bill provides for a paper trail (toilet paper roll-style records affixed to DRE voting machines) in 2008, requires more durable ballots in 2010, and requires a complex set of audits. It also cements and further empowers a concentration of power over elections under the White House, gives explicit federal sanction to trade secrets in vote counting, mandates an expensive 'text conversion' device that does not yet exist which is not fully funded, and removes 'safe harbor' for states in a way that opens them up to unlimited, expensive, and destabilizing litigation." Update: 07/11 16:23 GMT by KD : Derek Slater writes "EFF's e-voting expert Matt Zimmerman recently published this article separating the myths about HR 811 from the facts, and countering many of the misleading and outright false claims being made about it."
My opinion is that the US election system has become too cumbersome/complicated for the average person. I'm Canadian, and I find voting very simple. Federal elections require me to check 1 box. That's it. There is about 7? boxes to choose from depending on which riding you are located in. Each box shows the name of the representative of a specific party. Provincial elections are the same, although there's usually less boxes. Municipal elections are actually the most complicated, in which I have to vote for Mayor, Councillor, and school board trustee. There's too many options on the US ballot, and having different ballots for every state or county when people are electing the president just makes things overly complicated. There would be no need for voting machines if people weren't voting on 75 different issues for every election. A simple pencil and paper ballot works a lot better.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The dems are fighting against this admin, accuse it of being corrupt (which it obviously is), is possibly about to lose the ability to monitor the WH (if they lose the up-coming battle in SCOTUS), and YET, they want to put voting admin under the WH.
In addition, they are removing from the states, saying that closed systems are fine, as well as dictating exactly how a complicated paper trail will be handled.
Offhand, I am guessing that this has MS written ALL over it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
How about a machine running Tivo-style Linux (so you can't mess with the software) that lets the user pick one out of several choices, then prints a receipt and says "Does the receipt match the screen?". It's /not/ /that/ /hard/.
The bill looks like it creates far more problems than it repairs...and doesn't repair the problems it is supposed to in the first place.
I'm a right-winger who doesn't think there is much to the election fraud arguments, and even I think that there needs to be a paper trail for voting. We don't need new laws to fix the problem, new bureaucracies...if there is ONE thing that needs to be transparent in government, it is the election process. BOTH sides of the aisle look bad on election matters right now, and no real practical solution has arisen out of Washington yet.
...for a better "nutshell" summary than the one in TFA. I read the whole thing, the actual whole thing, including all the comments with the bad avatar-like photos, and I'm still confused about why this Holt Bill is so bad. I'm not saying it's good. I'm just saying I don't know. Most of all, I don't particularly trust the summary of someone who then goes on to argue against a bill, mainly by just repeating the same comments over and over again with no deeper explanation.
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
is the dead tree solution without any computers in site. Anything else is bad for everyone except Diebold.
>>if there is ONE thing that needs to be transparent in government, it is the election process.
Actually, if as much as possible regarding the critical issues of the day aren't publicly available, then having an open election process does not matter. How does one differentiate the candidates in an information vacuum?
--"It's not the end of the world, but you can see it from there."
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
If Yes then the ballot is moved into a box and the tally is tallied.
At the closing of the voting day, several precincts are selected at random and their paper ballots are counted by hand. If the hand count agrees with the machine count, then the other precincts are counted via their machine counts and the vote count is published.
NB, no ballot counts are published until the hand count is verified.
This preserves the sanctity of the voter's vote. It has nothing to do with making "Bozo and Bozette at 6 and 10" happy.
By adding a voter-verifiable paper trail, it addresses by far the most serious problem with DRE voting machines. Using the rationale that we shouldn't pass it because it leaves some problems unsolved is making the perfect the enemy of the good. This is the way many activist communities shoot themselves in the foot. As for limiting the states, as I understand it this doesn't. From the EFF:
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
While in principal I agree that every vote counts, and every vote is sacred... [deep breath] An election is a system. It is a machine. It has to have SOME fault-tolerance.
:-)) to administer a fault-critical system... Let's fix the fault-critical system.
But when one vote can swing one state can swing one electoral bloc can swing one election can swing one world climate/political landscape/economy... THAT is a BSOD waiting to happen. With the ability to count 99.994% of the votes instantly, the need for the Electoral College is obviated. Instead of using a fault-ridden system (Imagine if the voting system was as buggy as WinME
LOSE THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE!!!
Then, if one precinct gets utterly lost or corrupted, then it dings the POPULAR vote tallies. The same person wins the election AND gets inaugurated. The only people who REALLY are affected by a tolerable tolerance of fault will be the Bookies in Vegas who handle the point spreads.
The Electoral College was a necessity in it's day when bandwidth was REALLY REALLY low. We may need it again, when votes within the United States of the Virgo Cluster are counted... but till then, abolish the Electoral College, even though it takes a Constitutional Amendment. We need to do this while we still have a Constitution to amend.
Part of the beauty of the US is that each state can experiment with different ideas. Ideally, in turn, each state can learn from the successes and mistakes of others. If all states were doing the same thing, then you would potentially miss out on way to do it even better. In general, the less that the federal government imposes on the states, the better. Similarly, in general, the less that the state government imposes on the local governments, the better. Sure, there are places where it's appropriate, but unless there's a strong overriding reason to get involved, larger governments should allow smaller governments to make their own decisions.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Sorry, but in our thirst for immediate results, we have completely hurt the process. Nobody should be allowed to announce election results for national elections until the last poll has closed in Hawaii.
OCO is Loco