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Judge Voids Un-Auditable California Election
For only the second time in California history, a judge in Alameda County voided an election result and called for the election to be re-run, because the e-voting tallies from Diebold machines couldn't be audited. The vote was on a controversial ballot measure addressing the operation of medical marijuana dispensaries, and the result was a close margin. Activists went to court to demand a recount, but after the lawsuit was filed, elections officials sent voting machines back to Diebold. The court found that 96% of the necessary audit information had been erased. The judge ordered the ballot measure to be re-run in the next election.
Here's some info on what was actually being voted on, because both the SLashdot and EFF summary treat it as a virtual irrelevance:
The plaintiffs were backers of Measure R, which would have allowed medical marijuana clubs to move into retail areas in Berkeley without public hearings and would have erased limits on the amount of cannabis that patients could have.
According to the county's certified results, the measure lost, 25,167 to 24,976. The initiative lost again in a recount.
== Jez ==
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If you had read the article, you would know that the problem was not the machines.
The city did perform a dump of the data before they returned the machines to Diebold; that was the responsibility of the people in california. Diebold was clearing the machines and when told to stop they did, however only 20 of the 400+ machines had not been cleared.
From the article it was the responsibility of the place holding the vote to do the dump of the data.
Diebold was responible for clearing the machine once it was returned, which they did.
They do compete in the private sector.. Diebold is a major producer of ATM machines.
illegal for recreational use... I could be wrong, but oxycotin is considered illegal as well if you do not have a prescription.
Walk with Music;
No.
Data from the NORC recount shows that under the legal standard in force at the time, the "intent of the voter", more ballots were cast for Gore than for Bush.
As the Washington Post admitted (though only deep into an article whose headline and lead tells how recounts would have favored Bush):
That's not even taking into account the inclusion of illegitimate absentee ballots that favored Bush, or the illegal disenfranchisement of likely Gore voters, or the poorly-designed and illegal "butterfly ballots" in Palm Beach.
It also appears that, emboldened by their success in Florida in 2000, the Bush camp went on to conduct massive vote fraud in Ohio in 2004, quite possibly enough to steal the election there.
Not meant as a flame. The corporate mainstream media did in fact report as if the recount favored Bush, by focusing on what recounts were demanded under Gore's strategy rather than the question of what ballots were actually cast.
But it is clear that in Florida in 2000, more voters went to the polls intending to vote for Gore; despite intimidation and illegal purges of the voter rolls, more voters got to the voting booth intending to vote for Gore; and despite bad balloting technology and practices (which disproportionately affected poor neighborhoods, making a mockery of "equal protection"), more voters voted for Gore than voted for Bush.
But the GOP played better politics than the spineless, gonad-less, soulless thing that is all that remains of the Democratic Party. And so came the point the historians will mark as the end of the
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Obviously someone who has never watched or read about the Diebold systems. They already have printers attached! Which proves it's not a technical issue at all, since part of the process is to print out a "zero tape" to prove that the totals inside the machine are zero. (Whether or not such thing is useful is debatable, since a zero tape proves nothing. It's trivial to change the software from printing the actual total to actually print a literal zero... more complex if you want to pass by an audit, but not terribly difficult to make a simple slip-up and actually print zeros when the internal totals aren't zero).
I think the printers even have a little window to which you can peek at them, and they don't necessarily output a slip, but remain in a locked box, too... (well, as secure as the memory card lock, anyhow...)
You mean kind of how the sale of the ephedra plant has been outlawed for use as a medicinal herb because it is "dangerous" yet ephedrine hcl which is far more potent and dangerous remains legal.... that couldn't possibly have had anything to do with pharmaceutical companies wanting a cut of the energy / diet pill market. Of course it left allergy and asthma sufferers out in the cold.
a Schedule I drug according to the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which classified marijuana as having high potential for abuse, no medical use, and not safe to use under medical supervision. Which any scientific study will tell is a load of steaming bullshit
True. Regardless of any feelings on the morality of marijuana use or whether it should be legalized, its Schedule I status, putting it on the same level as crack and amphetamines, is simple stupidity. It has well documented uses, is quite safe, and is no where near as addictive as any number of illegal drugs, and may be less so than alcohol. It does have potential for abuse and that is a different question.
The concern is, presumably, that admitting it has uses, given that it is relatively safe (particularly as compared to commonly prescribed opiates), it will become widely used medically. This is a political issue though and a stupid one. It has nothing to do with medical facts and a lot to do with fiber production.
The debate over whether marijuana should be recreationally legal, whether its use commonly endangers others (say, driving under the influence), and what any penalties should be is heavily clouded by this problem. It also makes the whole drug problem harder because it makes the entire drug classification system look partisan and useless, which, to some extent, it is exactly that. It results in a loss of respect for the system.
But with booze (in the United States alone): The annual average number of deaths for which alcohol poisoning was listed as an underlying cause was 317, with an age-adjusted death rate of 0.11 per 100,000 population. An average of 1,076 additional deaths included alcohol poisoning as a contributing cause, bringing the total number of deaths with any mention of alcohol poisoning to 1,393 per year (0.49 per 100,000 population).
You can't take the sky from me...