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To: muawiyah
"Paper ballots offered no more of an audit trail than any other method!"

That is nonsense muawiyah. Paper is fragile, but once a ballot has been marked, placed in secure container in plain view of precinct workers from all parties, and counted in the presence of those parties, and the boxes secured and stored with all the security we have, transported to storage warehouses with witnesses from both parties, with electronics [RFID is common but there are a number of newer technologies]to monitor the boxes as are used in Walmart, and video surveillance of the counting just like what is found in every gambling casino in the US beyond corner drugstores, which allow the Casino to read every hand you play, with videos stored for months or even years, you have a reasonable assurance that a recount can be performed.

Once bits are written to memory, of any type, with no error checking or correction meaningful, since the original action cannot be verified (a touchscreen or button or scan produces a few bytes with no audit trail, no paper copy; though paper printouts are often provided, they are not themselves provably valid). Every electronic counting device would need to be installed and operated from within a Faraday cage to try to prevent remote access for data manipulation or control. Electronic data acquisition provides the easiest means of inventing election results because so few understand the many stages associated with insuring that data are valid.

It was my business for over twenty years, and part of my job was to anticipate mechanisms for falsifying data because the FDA was fierce about results submitted without thorough authentication, and wouldn't consider allowing drugs manufactured without such audit trails to be approved, and would certainly prosecute anyone caught submitting false analysis. If the "Blue Box" at Moffett Field can be penetrated, and NSA facilities can spend billions trying to secure their internal communications, what chance is there that election precincts can make their electronics secure. With so much money at stake I can assure you that a standard electronics component, usually based upon "Field Programmable Gate Arrays", FPGAs, could have a cell added to otherwise identical units for communicating with an external source, and not even the manufacturers would know.

45 posted on 05/20/2013 4:53:13 PM PDT by Spaulding
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To: Spaulding
There's simply no audit trail ~ electronic or paper ~ that tracks backwards from the point where the ballots are counted to the citizen who voted.

It does not exist!

As anyone who has ever studied the Chicago method can tell you witnesses lie, officials can be bribed, boxes can be swapped,.......

46 posted on 05/20/2013 5:33:57 PM PDT by muawiyah
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To: Spaulding
and video surveillance of the counting just like what is found in every gambling casino in the US beyond corner drugstores, which allow the Casino to read every hand you play, with videos stored for months or even years, you have a reasonable assurance that a recount can be performed.

That's it. We should have our polling places located inside casinos.

Only half joking, Spaulding. The casino bosses don't play games. Too bad the people in charge of our electoral process do.

57 posted on 05/20/2013 9:13:56 PM PDT by thecodont
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To: Spaulding

I’m for paper ballots based on that analysis.


77 posted on 05/22/2013 10:49:47 AM PDT by MeneMeneTekelUpharsin (Freedom is the freedom to discipline yourself so others don't have to do it for you.)
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