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."

Comments

My opinion

[CastrTroy]

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.

Re:My opinion

[CastrTroy]

Actually, no, we only vote for the people who will represent us in our tiny little area. So we don't vote for the Prime Minister, or the provincial premier, (at least no most of us). We vote for somebody from our area who is (supposedly) looking out for the people in that small area. The leader of the party with the most people voted in become Prime Minister. In the US, people do vote for the supreme overload (the president) but the problem is that they also have to vote for millions of other little things. What's the point of electing people if you can't delegate to them some of the decision making.

Re:My opinion

[CastrTroy]

I cannot have confidence in a voting system unless I completely understand how it works. I am a software developer, and I don't trust any voting system which uses software specifically because most people, including myself, wouldn't be able to understand the system, or wouldn't take the time to understand the system, even if they could. With paper ballots that are counted by hand, I completely understand every aspect of the voting and counting system. People from all parties can actually watch the actual count and verify that they are counted correctly. Security measure can be put in place to ensure that there is no ballot stuffing, by checking the box before hand, and comparing the number of votes counted to the number of people who actually voted. I'm not saying paper is infallible, but that I trust it because I can look at it and understand it. Why should I believe the claims that your "VoteHere" system is any more reliable or trustworthy than a system made by Diebold? Like you said, "Trust no one". Why should I trust any organization if I can't verify the voting process by myself.

Also, the other problem with using machines is that they sometimes break, or there aren't enough of them to go around, and people end up waiting hours in line to vote. I've never had to wait more than 5 minutes to cast my ballot, and that's the way it should be. Making people wait so long to vote discourages them, and brings down the number of people who vote, and this invalidates the whole problem.

Re:Amazing

[internic]

Remember, the point of this bill is to add auditing requirements and voter verifiability. For whatever flaws it might have, those are laudible goals that are designed to fight corruption.

Offhand, I am guessing that this has MS written ALL over it.

Offhand, I'd say you're wrong. Originally, this bill required the voting machine software to be open source. I think that was weakened in a compromise to actually get the thing passed, but it still requires some outside review of the source, as I understand it. AFAIK, MS has been against this bill from the start because it required such openness.

Re:Amazing

[hey!]

I can't agree. The Democrats aren't what they ought to be, of course, but can you honestly say that straight up Republican rule produced the same results as straight up Democratic rule, which we've had many times in the last fifty years?

The problem with the Republican party is that they are no longer conservatives. When I was kid, the Republican party was a place for people of a temperate, Burkean conservative temperament. This viewpoint was skeptical, and very wary of the dangers posed by misuse of government power, but in the end pragmatic. Now, I'm a Democrat, but that's the kind of Republican government I could live with.

The problem was this hadn't produced a big, generational victory for the Republicans like the Democrats had after the Great Depression.

So, certain elements in the party decided to gain power by inflaming populist fears and anger. To do this, they needed media power and that takes money. This mix of populism and secret privilege lead to electoral success for the party, but not political success. The Republican party shifted to a new ideological style that is nearly the opposite of what the old Republican party stood for. The rank and file Republicans I know aren't for a larger and more expensive government with unprecedented powers to intrude into the affairs of its citizens.

Some Democrats I know toyed with the Greens until the 2000 election fiasco. They didn't think the Democrats stood up for Democratic principles. Where is the party that stands up for traditional Republican values?