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Paper Ballots Will Return In MD and VA
cheezitmike writes "According to a story in the Washington Post, 'Maryland and Virginia are going old school after Tuesday's election. Maryland will scrap its $65 million electronic system and go back to paper ballots in time for the 2010 midterm elections. In Virginia, localities are moving to paper after the General Assembly voted last year to phase out electronic voting machines as they wear out. "The battle for the hearts and minds of voters on whether electronic systems are good or bad has been lost," Brace said. The academics and computer scientists who said they were unreliable "have won that battle."'"
The biggest problem with "e-Voting" is they tried to make it "all E."
Computer-assisted voting for the blind and physically disabled is a must.
A computer that takes the voter's choice and spits out a computer-AND human-readable ballot, plus a separate machine for blind people to use to read back their ballot to them, plus a separate machine to count the votes, would meet the requirements of allowing the blind and disabled to vote as much as the current high-tech systems do while providing the paper trail the old systems do.
As a bonus, non-disabled voters and voters comfortable with human assistance do not require the use of any technology at the time they cast their votes. If the power goes out, the polls can remain open. This means polling stations can scale to more voting booths very cheaply.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The Electoral College system has been losing popularity in recent years (notably among Democrats, for some odd reason *grin*), but I actually think it's a good thing, and here's why: No election is ever going to be perfect. In order to declare a winner with certainty, you need a very certain tally of the votes. I think we should be able to get the counted results for an election to be *very* reliable, in terms of errors, but I don't think you can ever achieve *perfection*.
When you have extremely close elections, like in the 2000 USA election between Bush and Gore, (witness how much havoc was wreaked by "Hanging Chads" and other problems), it's almost impossible to get a nationwide total that people will agree is valid, particularly if the difference between the candidates is less than 1/10 of 1 percent. You get trapped in 'recount' limbo, and 'rules lawyer' hell (where advocates for either side try to argue why certain ballots should be counted one way or another, trying to guess the intent of a vote with a hanging chad, or trying to figure out if some votes were made by people illegally voting multiple times with the names and addresses of dead people, or the same person voting multiple times under different addresses in different precincts.
The electoral college system helps 'smooth out' our inability to get *perfect exact totals*, by making the election be a district-by-district contest, where it's usually easier to decide which candidate got more votes in an individual district or state, than it is to determine the exact national total of votes. It's sort of like analog vs. digital recording of data: theoretically, analogue would be an exact represention, perfect, but we find in reality that analog recordings suffer from imperfections which distort them; digital, on the other hand, while never a truly exact/perfect representation of the data, gives us a way to record the data in such a way that we can compensate for later distortions which are introduced during transmission or duplication, and usually get much closer to perfection than analog allows.
(I would like to note that, technically, right now, the 'districts' are entire states; I do think we should break it down into smaller districts, like congressional districts or something - I don't like winner-takes-all delegate allocations at the state level, because that's too 'low resolution').
With the electoral college, if there is a problem with voting in one state or district, you can at least narrow down the 'fight' over recounts, etc, to the state or district where there is a problem or extremely close contest and don't have to worry about any other states/districts. If we went to a popular national vote, if you have a close election, recounts and rules lawyering will have to go on in every single district in the nation. That sounds ugly, and expensive to me, and more susceptible to fraud/manipulation, because the nations attention will be spread out over every state/district, instead of just worrying if the votes in say, Florida, or Ohio, or New Mexico, are accurate, and if there was fraud in those individual areas. It allows us to focus on specific places, instead of *everywhere*.
yeah but she doesn't believe in dinosaurs! I mean wtf, anybody that doesn't fear a sudden velocoraptor attack just ain't right in the head!
Also relevent may be
the report outlining her abuse of power which she "hasn't had time to read yet" but some how "cleard her"
she has only left the us once
shes a creationist
she cant name any papers she reads
she cant name any supreme court rullings except roe vs wade
she thinks taking 14 g hrs between waters breaking and going to hospital with a downs syndrome child (already a heightened chance of miscarriage) is a good idea
she thinks shes in charge of the senate
but nah its mainly the dinosour stuff.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!