Posted on 01/12/2004 4:54:35 PM PST by GregD
The people who are advocating that this thread be pulled need to grow up.
If you will, I hope you and others that agree with this position will come to our site and sign up as volunteers. Time is drawing close, we have efforts underway that can be as simple as phone calls and e-mails.
For those willing to take the time to do so, we need people to go to your legislators offices and talk to their staff. One of our actions is called "Adopt a legislator".
Also, we need conservative organizations who will endorse the bills.
Democrats air concern on vote fraud
Pardon me for being a skeptic...but I think all democrats are liars. This is all smoke and mirrors in my opinion. The same crap happened in 2000...just before democrats claimed they were "disenfranchised" and the votes were not counted. BTW, just because 134 votes are not counted does not mean that people intended to vote. They may be protest non-votes...something I have done on occasion.
I do agree that there needs to be a paper trail.
I question your honesty and motive.
I am not the first to raise the possibility that if their wrongdoing is substantial, that there could be significant penalties. I refer you to our SoS who spoke to that issue on Dec 16th:
Now the audit is not complete. We don't have all the findings as yet, and we don't know what's occurred comprehensively. I would hope that the end result sanction that we suggested we might make today, pursuant to this hearing taking place, won't be the suggestion of de-certification of Diebold systems. I would hope that won't be the case. I certainly hope that won't be the case with other vendors as well. But if we find that there are gross discrepancies and violations, I am prepared to go down that road, and so this needs to be taken very, very seriously.
And later in the meeting, Asst. SoS Carrel discussed referring this to the AG and District Attorneys. If they take it that seriously, why should we not support them?
I spent too many hours reading the famous Diebold e-mails, and am far too suspicious of their ethics, to simply "pat them on the head and say don't do it again." http://diebold.f-451.net/
http://www.verifiedvoting.org/kevinshelley2003dec16.asp
I want a printer that spits out a copy of the ballot, clearly marking my choices so I can make sure that they match with my intentions, and I want a box where that print out goes into that will count as my vote. Does this match the goals of your organization?
Unequivocably, yes.
We have a "Resolution On Electronic Voting" on our site that was written a year ago, and resulted from discussions including the computer science community. It acknowledged the possibility that future technologies could introduce the use of a TRUSTED technology (which may not be defined or available as we talk today - maybe a write-only CD, DVD or similar) in the future. However, in today's environment, we recognize the reality that the only TRUSTED solution for this is paper.
There have been discussions, in which concerns were expressed that allowing the voter to touch the ballot could facilitate vote selling. So to defend against that, some proposals were offered.
Scenario 1 - Prevent the voter from physically touching the ballot. Show it to them "under glass" and spoil ballots that are not accepted as final. In this scenario, it sounds like we use the voting system to tally the vote, and only use the paper for "mandatory random recounts for system validation" and "recounts in the case of a close or challenged election".
This introduces paper jam and other prospective issues, so it may not be the optimal solutions.
Scenario 2 - Allow the voter to handle the final printed ballot, but they must surrender that document which is then scanned (for tallying votes) and retained for recounting purposes.
There may be other examples, and approaches, but the concept is we don't want the voter marching down the street (having turned in a counterfit ballot) and exchanging the real one for payment (vote selling.)
So correct me if I am wrong, but I do believe we are in agreement on your point.
This was a 1-race, special election, in which only Republicans were running.
There was no reason to go to the polling place other than to vote. If they wanted to protest, they would not have signed in at the precinct.
And it is my understanding that this was an "upscale area" with educated people who were "not too stupid to know how to vote". It appears that these "educated voters" simply neglected to hit the final button. And the absence of a paper trail resulted in the inability to comply with state law because there is now less than a .25 percent margin in the final results.
I'm not really concerned about whether you or anyone else question my honesty or motive. If you read my orignial post, my responses to the various questions and statements, and visit our site - you should be able to clearly understand our sincerity. We didn't spend the past 6 months pursuing this in order to somehow "create an opportunity to cheat". We are trying urgently to find a way to PREVENT cheating, and more-so, to resolve the fact that computers are not error-free.
Please help us pass HR2239 and S1980.
I agree completely. Nor should they be build upon an unsecured MS Access, rely solely upon Windows "security", receive vote tallys transmitted by cellphones, or a number of other poor security implementations.
Chuck Hagel, the Republican Senator linked to DIEBOLD
Actually, I need to correct you. Hagel was the CEO of ES&S. Look at these articles. I don't care what party he belongs to, the whole thing stinks
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=hagel+ES%26S+ethics
I would strongly endorse anyone else but me pursuing that in the most tenacious manner. I am sick of spending hundreds of dollars annually to pay for an "expert" to determine "how much more" I owe.
But I am also shocked at how much effort it has taken to simply get these e-voting bills passed. When I am done with this campaign, I'm heading out on a long fishing trip - far away from computers and telephones.
And frankly, we need a citizens movement to demand that all the bullshit be taken out of the various spending bills which does nothing but cost EACH OF US money we worked hard for. I'm tired of paying the share of corporations that have moved their headquarters offshore, and refuse to pay their fair share.
But this is generally off my topic, so that's my final word unrelated to electronic voting. :)
AND I FREAKING HATE CASINOS
The only real improvement I can think of would be to require a "No Vote" choice in each race, to prevent filling in blank ballots at the end of the day.
For computerized voting I would have the votes recorded at the time of voting on a continuous paper tape, using some form of optically scannable encoding that would be impossible for humans to read or modify.
Nothing less than paper is required for audit purposes.
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