| Civic minded elementary school children could do the counting in front of the public with superior affordability, reliability, security, and accuracy.
Most humans can't correctly count the number of times the letter 'F' appears in a sentence. |
Posted on 08/24/2008 5:29:09 PM PDT by lifelong_republican
"...vanishing votes, breakdowns, malfunctions and increasing evidence that the devices were vulnerable to hackers..."
(Excerpt) Read more at ap.google.com ...
Civic minded elementary school children could do the counting in front of the public with superior affordability, reliability, security, and accuracy.
Representation in government is THAT important.
Holy Hanging Chads Batman!
After what happened in Florida in 2000 with the hanging chads with computer punch card voting, so many places were eager to go to electronic voting. Now we see that there are problems with those machines too.
There has never been a perfect vote count in any election. The punch cards probably were the best that we can do, as far as accuracy, plus having a ready made audit trail available in case of re-counts. How do you do a re-count of electronic voting where there is no paper trail?
Now if we can only convince “concerned voters” to wake up, get out of bed, clean themselves up, go to the polls, show an I.D. and complete a paper ballot ON ELECTION DAY, we’d be getting somewhere. All this electronic and mail-in crap is nothing but voter fraud. If they care about America, make them exert at least a little energy and effort when we are deciding who is going to run this country.
Texas is keeping its electronic voting machines. I don't think we've had any complaints.
The problem with the “hanging chads”
was real, but the problems with the
electronic blackboxes are orders of
magnitude worse.
I’m in Florida, the money we’ve wasted since the 2000 election, all because of the chads, is unbelievable.
First we had to do away with the punch card system that had worked well for years...before Gore decided to throw a hissy fit. (I told my husband that night...there will never again be a “normal” election because of this...always accusations of cheating.)
So we bought the electronic in our county, now the electronic are out, and we’re moving to optical scanners. Big bucks for a heavily populated county and betcha dollar to a donut, one day the punch cards will be back.
Our electronic machines have a paper print out that you can verify prints what you chose on the touch screen. Works great.
FlingWingFlyer you make a great point
about encouraging voters to go to the
polls, preferably informed. Even the
voters who are physically disabled
should be represented in government.
Some people are working their two or
three jobs and some employers don’t
offer sufficient time off to vote.
Dawn531 you are right about the Florida
fiasco being inexcusable. It boils down
to voters being prevented from voting.
The optical scan devices are hackable.
A printout doesn’t actually have to
correlate with a transmitted tally.
Our Florida county had optical equipment in 2000 and our recounts were consistently accurate. Our Supervisor of Elections was very good, well respected throughout the state but his advice fell on deaf ears in the RAT counties anxious to spend OPM on the flashy stuff. As a taxpayer I'm outraged.
everybody gets a specially marked marble as they enter the polling place. You go into the booth and drop the marble into the box of the candidate you want to vote for. The one who has the most marbles in his box wins.
Optical is definitely hackable
(one example is the Hursti Hack).
You’re right about the possibility
of audits or recounts, but they are
not done sufficiently often. You’re
also right about the Democrats being
outrageous abusers of the voters and
the taxpayers forcing the defective
systems on the public. They broke
a lot of elections laws to deny
voters real ballots, especially
in such states as Pennsylvania.
the stories about hackable electronic devices are myths being propogated by the people who’d rather not see technology applied here. the people who’d rather be able to manipulate a stack of handrwitten ballots.
we’ve had ATM machines for decades, direct deposit for some time, electronic filing.
over 99% of money exchanged is done electronically.
we can’t figure out how to count votes without widespread fraud? give me a break.
At the last city I was in, they had electronic ones and I loved it. Just put in the card, hit 2 or 3 touch screen buttons and hand back the card.
Simple and fast.
Here you have to make marks on paper which takes awhile and then put them in a scanner which electronically records it anyway.
I prefer the visual feedback from the touch screen. You put the paper in this other type thing and all it says is ‘vote recorded’.
Excellent point. I was about to post a similar comment then read yours. I do most of my banking online, and have never been "hacked". As an ex-computer expert(retired) I would rather place my faith in a computerized voting machine then in paper ballots that can suddenly be "found" to add to the recount, which happened in 2000 and again in 2006 in Washington state.
In 2000, the whining, emotional, unthinking liberals demanded those voting machins that worked just like ATMs...
And it was evidence of racism that the poor and minority communities “Dodn’t Have Them” which was a big joke because a study by two university profs found that rich white suburbs were the most likely users of “inferior” punch card machines.
Now they have a new whine...about the problem they created. HOW LIBERAL!
It’s the computer scientists and security experts
who’ve pointed out the flaws and vulnerabilities
in the voting systems.
The ‘voting’ systems are inferior to the ATM systems,
and the ATM systems have had numerous problems, too.
There is a lot of good information out there if you
take the time to look for it.
| Civic minded elementary school children could do the counting in front of the public with superior affordability, reliability, security, and accuracy.
Most humans can't correctly count the number of times the letter 'F' appears in a sentence. |
Yep, couldn’t possibly be people rejecting the liberals and thier BS ideas, nops must be they GOP cheated!
We do audit trails in business all the time without paper...what’s the big deal about a paper trail? Data is data.
The touch screens are unreliable, hackable,
exhorbitantly expensive, make voting take
longer, and are known to lose, switch, and
fake votes.
All the bells and whistles are worse than
pointless when your vote isn’t counted.
The fact is that the computer scientists and
computer security experts have pointed out
the problems with the voting systems, which
are definitely not analagous to those used in
banking for a number of reasons.
The electronic ‘voting’ systems aren’t
really that similar to the ATM systems.
Conservatives insist that it’s wrong to
waste money on defective equipment, and
particularly when it keeps voters from
casting their ballots and having them
counted as intended.
Vote with an absentee ballot if nothing else. I have done so for years because the unpredictable nature of my work schedule.
The electronic ‘voting’ systems are actually
extremely unreliable.
Their MTBF values are extremely low.
Even the GAO reports that they’re unsuitable
for use in elections.
Many people can actually count accurately, if
one seeks them out.
Do you get a receipt when you
make purchases?
You are totally right AbeLincoln.
The cartoon’s great, too.
Thank you!
In many areas, the absentee ballots
are entered into the electronics.
Yes, I have no problem going back to paper ballots or punchcards (with better chads) or “connect the black arrows with the magic marker.” The election system must be as tamper-proof as possible.
I am happy with the paper ballots we have in my area of CA but would just as soon have a "reliable" computerized voting system. However, if it comes down to getting rid of absentee ballots and motor voter and using paper with voter ID established in all states or using computerized voting and no ID and motor voter and absentee ballots still in effect, I choose the paper.
The DNC and Al Gore must pay for the costs.
Not in North Dakota (so far).
I agree with you totally on the concept of “tamper-proof”! It’s one of our most important obligations as Americans.
You’re right to choose the paper. Computer scientists and security experts point out that there is no electronic system available today that’d be sufficiently secure.
If you think 2000 was bad, if McCain wins, it will be 100 times worse in 2008. At least in 2000 there weren't riots in the streets of every US city.
EggsAckley you’re right that some of the machines were sold from Venezuelan ownership. The machines are too-often built in secrecy in communist China, too.
Sorry to say, but the taxpayers have already been robbed by the electronic ‘voting’ racketeers.
Yep. And it was mainly due to a big push from disaffected lib Democratic voters mostly, who were so upset at GWB "stealing" the election with dimpled chads, etc. that they demanded a new system.
Now, those same Democrats are demanding we return to the paper ballot system.
It is so typical for Democrat voters who are so angry, they demand change when they don't even know what they wanted in the first place.
North Dakota’s been more wise than most about this, but it still uses optical scans, which can be hacked.
The electronic ‘voting’ racketeers have threatened officials with HAVA 2002, the ‘Help America Vote Act’, which was introduced by Robert Ney of Ohio ...
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h107-3295
It the paper print out used for the official talley or is the official talley done electronically?
I think using the paper print out as the official ballot and the electronic talley as a check and a “quick look” combines the best of both worlds. The paper print out can be designed to be unambiguous and tamper resistant, while the electronic machine provides an audit trail. Any serious disagreement between the paper talley and electronic talley will show up in an instant.
Give us a citation where the machine faked a vote.
over 99% of money exchanged is done electronically.
we can’t figure out how to count votes without widespread fraud? give me a break.
Electronic financial fraud runs to tens of billions of dollars per year. In a $1.4 trillion GDP, that is literally decimal dust, the financial institutions consider it a cost of doing business and pass the costs on to their customers in the form of higher interest rates.
Unless the cyber thieves get really greedy, say $150 million from a single institution in a single attack, the banks and the authorities aren't all that vigorous in their pursuit of the perps.
I would not hold our electronic financial systems up as exemplars of security. But at least the generally accepted accounting principles and double-entry bookkeeping force the institutions to track and report the losses.
The designs of most of the electronic voting machines were at least an order of magnitude insecure compared to your average ATM. ATMs don't usually have USB ports available to the general public where I can insert a thumb drive and create a rogue administrator account on the device and install a backdoor in less than five seconds, nor are the ROM chips easily accessible for change out.
Unlike electronic money, I can create votes without the accountability issues caused by financial bookkeeping and accounting. There are inner city precincts that routinely report turnout rates in excess of 100% without electronic voting and the authorities have no interest in pursuing the fraud.
With electronic voting, it would be possible to engineer any result you wanted. Our election results would look like Cuba, North Korea, or Iraq voting for Saddam.
That is not to say that you couldn't easily design and build a more secure electronic voting machine, but it seemed that no one really wanted to. The manufacturers and the states fought hard against any form of penetration testing as part of the faux "certification" processes.
If the voter never sees (or submits) the paper ballot, that doesn’t lend confidence. OTOH, poll workers would have to spend hours explaining the damn things to the confused if they did.
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Republicans who think that humans can count more reliably than machines remind me of Democrats who think that wind can power the United States. The disconnect between the science and the reality is so great that the mind boggles.