Can America Trust Electronic Voting? 452
A anonymous reader writes: "The Sacramento Bee wrote an excellent article about the issues surrounding electronic voting. It was written by the Yolo County clerk/recorder and a professor of law at UC Davis. They quote sources such as Peter G. Neumann and Diebold's president Walden O'Dell."
Hasn't Australia just mandated a paper trail (Score:5, Informative)
Simon.
Re:Hasn't Australia just mandated a paper trail (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Redundant, I know (Score:1, Informative)
That's really the only way to verify the process, but too many people will complain about giving up their anonymity, so things get messy...
Except he was not appointed (Score:5, Informative)
Whether or not he is the worst president, you are accepting someone's lie as fact. The Supreme Court did not appoint him. The Electoral College did, however, through the usual process of election.
All the Supreme Court did was refuse to bother with a frivolous appeal filed with them. They in effect did nothing and let the real results of the election stand.
absentee ballots? (Score:2, Informative)
Then again, I've never had trouble filling out my absentee ballots in WA. You just draw a line to complete an arrow next to the option you want to vote for.
I hate spin (Score:1, Informative)
Bush won the Florida vote, which pushed him over the top for the national electoral totals. Bush did file an appeal, but it was not frivolous: he appealed a Florida court decision that basically said "Gore won here even those he got fewer votes than Bush".
"combined with chasing black folk away from polls"
That is an urban legend. Sounds really outrageous, so it keeps going. Yet it never happened. Gore and the NAACP would not touch this with a ten-foot pole, since it never happened. If it had, they would have rightly run with it.
"President Bush is clearly following the Joseph Stalin elctoral model"
Yet it is your man Kucinich who is proposing stalinist policies.
"It doesn't matter who votes so much as who does the counting"
No matter who counted it, gore lost.
A legal and easy ballot (Score:1, Informative)
You don't have to wait for the true results of that election: we knew them in November of 2000.
Computer voting useful when vote is more complex (Score:2, Informative)
Recounting that, and redirecting those preferential flows is a PITA. I've done poll clerking, and counting. Its long.
I believe America has a x marks the spot first past the post system. Electronic counting there not so important or diffucult.
Re:absolutely not (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, too bad so much of this vitrol is true. Take a look at this article on ZDnet [com.com]. Its about that guy at Intel that got arrested, and the "evidence" that let the US hold him for over a month in solitary confinement (check the date on the article and the date in the story). He was a Citizen of The United States. A citizen. You know, the people who make up this country, live here, and who are guaranteed certain rights such as due process, a speedy trial, and representation? You? Me? Note also the end of the article:
So he's not an isolated case.
According to what was released by the government (who has recently felt an unusual need to hide the truth from its people on a lot of things, such as trials, so its entirely possible they have other charges they're neglecting to let us know about) Mike's crimes were growing a beard after the sept. 11 attacks and visiting China during the same time that a group of other people arrested the year before had visited. Ah, sweet justice.
Did you know that Bush said he doesn't read the newspapers [nwsource.com]? Yeah, thats right, he "trusts" his advisors to tell him whats worth knowing in the news. These are the same people that brought us nukes in the middle east, magical disappearing WMDs that nobody has found yet, and our current foreign policy of "piss everyone off".
As for Bush's belief in "democracy", he'd rather be a dictator. [buzzflash.com] Out of context? Joking? You decide.
Nobody "underestimates" Bush. The fact is, the poor man is an idiot and a puppet for the people pulling his strings and whispering in his ear who we didn't vote for and who we have no control over. Your examples of Germany and Japan are great ones, too bad they shine brighter than the US right now.
Verifiedvoting.org - (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Except he was not appointed (Score:3, Informative)
And the Supreme Court - acting in violation of federal, state, and international law, as well as judicial rules of procedure [wsws.org] - selected Florida's electors.
Your recall of events is hazy. If they'd done nothing, the recount would have continued.
The "real results" are that:
What they need (Score:3, Informative)
The only thing they really need electronic voting for is speed. They want the results faster than manual counting would allow. If you want a system at least as good as what we had, all you need is a system that produces machine+human-readable ballots.
When you vote, the machine when finished prints out a ballot with both machine-readable (barcode, perhaps) and human-readable versions of your vote. You confirm that it matches your vote, then drop it in the ballot box. The voting machine can hold an electronic tally internally which can be read after close of polls for a fast result. If there's a question of validity, you machine-scan the machine-readable portions of the printed ballots. As a check, you can compare the human-readable and machine-readable portions of a sample of the printed ballots to make sure the two really do match. If you select the sample randomly, it'd be statistically improbable for the voting machines to deliberately put incorrect machine-readable versions down without getting caught at it.
You can use smart-cards or whatnot for enabling a vote on the machine, and the traditional methods work for spoiled ballots. A one-use magnetic card like the airlines use for tickets would be even cheaper.
Given that it's not all that hard to design a system like that, I have to wonder why Diebold and the rest are so adamant about not doing it.