Posted on 01/17/2008 4:33:20 PM PST by Bloody Sam Roberts
Both New Hampshire primary elections are going to be recounted, since Dennis J. Kucinich has put up $27,000 to get the Democratic recount started, and Albert Howard (who was on the New Hampshire Republican ballot) has donated $56,000 to re-tally the Republican vote.
But the only reason these elections can even be recounted is because voting precincts in New Hampshire use paper ballots. And now some folks on Capitol Hill want to make it easier for other states to switch to non-electronic voting systems before the November election.
Rush Holt, a Democratic representative of New Jersey, introduced new legislation today that would reimburse all state and local jurisdictions that opted to convert to a paper ballot voting system, offer emergency paper ballots or convert audits by hand counts.
Speaking at a news conference in Washington this afternoon, Mr. Holt said there’s still time to make sure the 2008 presidential election doesn’t see the same voting controversy as happened in Florida in 2006, when some 18,000 electronically recorded ballots were marked “no vote,” and there was no accounting for what happened.
This bill, called the Emergency Assistance for Secure Elections Act of 2008, is a modified version of a bill Mr. Holt introduced last year that would have required a voter-verified paper ballot for every vote cast, in addition to random auditing. Since that more all-encompassing bill is still awaiting the House floor, Mr. Holt introduced this one, which moves from a paper ballot mandate to a paper ballot enticement.
(Excerpt) Read more at thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com ...
As long as it's counted right in the precinct, and the recount is too.
If the recount is done a day later after the ballots have been moved to a central location, all integrity is lost.
When I lived a few towns South, I voted in a guy's garage- he volunteered (this was Redondo Beach). But after the election he got his garage back and the ballots went somewhere else.
My polling place was
a residence.
It's possible to design electronic systems to make votes immutable, by having representatives of each party give each other digitally-signed copies of them immediately at close of polls. I am unaware of any system that does that.
Each party would supply its own reader, and all the software for the reader would be open source. Since the media inserted into the reader would be physically write-protected, there would be no way that illegitimate software on the reader could do anything to it. Fundamentally, each reader would serve three purposes:
To be sure, it may be possible for one party to implement a denial-of-service attack by simply refusing to sign off on a legitimate ballot image, but I don't see that as accomplishing much. A variety of interested parties could come to the scene with readers until a consensus was reached as to what the ballot card actually contained.
The key point would be that since each party would supply its own reader equipment, it could have confidence that its own reader was not tampered with.
Could that 'physical' write-protection be bypassed with a 'secret' instruction code? By the way, my comments have only been about the 'code' cartridge, not the tally cartridge. Also, are you aware of 'microcode'? Much can be accomplished with it you know. I've spent 1 career in electronics, another in software development. I am very aware of what can be accomplished with our amazing technology.
If public trust is ever desired and accomplished then methods and procedures the public can easily understand must be utilized. If public trust is NOT desired then, by all means, use technology that most people do not understand. It isn't easy to be aware of what electrons are doing. They're very small you know.
The crooks at the polling center would know just how many blue or red ballots were used. In precincts that have 99.9 (or even 105%) support for the Democrats, they are going to “run out” of ballots so they might request more (only?) Democrat ballots. So sad if you can’t vote Republican there.
And if there are any Democrat ballots left over at the end of the day, just throw them in the box. No thanks.
The Democrats in Florida HAD a ballot machine. They toured it around in the aftermath of election day. Wasn’t that criminal posession of the equipment?
Vote fraud is never prosecuted. Democrats will continue to cheat. They care more about winning than about winning people over to their ideas.
That discriminates against purple people who haven’t voted yet.
And it discriminates against people with nice clean white shirts and people who have an aversion to dirty ink or have religious avoidence of “makeup”. < /s >
You want “write protection”? Don’t use a re-writable programable ROM chip. Write once. The media couldn’t HANDLE any attempt to change it. There would be no “override”.
I think we had an election here in the past 20 years where the sitting mayor (who was up for re-election) had a polling center in his own garage. He may have been prohibited from going there on election day but it still stinks.
I agree. The count must take place immediately after the polls close. If the count is done simply and openly with sufficient observers (at least 1 per issue/candidate, not simply 1 per 'party'), the resultant vote could be considered final with no recounts necessary.
If all parties present and responsible for the tally signed off on the counts there would probably be no need for the preservation of the ballots after the counts have been locally and publicly posted, recorded, and reliably transferred to the Secretary's of State or whoever is responsible for the total count of all precincts.
I have no interest in write-protection of a high tech device. My interest is in keep-it-simple-stupid! Paper ballots and human counters with sufficient observers all done in public.
I thought electronic voting machines were supposed to FIX all the voting problems.
What I find amazing is that these mental wizards didn’t design an electronic voting machine that spits out a paper ballot which can be visually verified before casting in a ballot box, and records the result electronically and transmits them in real time as well. Then the physical ballots and the electronic count can be compared to ensure there is no election tampering.
Although, as a side note, aren’t paper ballots counted by machine too?
Couldn’t that be tampered with?
How do you propose to write to a parallel flash memory chip without physical access to the /WE and /OE pins (the former pin being pulled high and the latter pin both pulled low and strapped low by the cap)? Is there any reason to expect any off-the-shelf flash chip to include such a feature?
Who could tell the difference between an off-the-shelf parallel flash memory chip and a modified one with identical packaging and marking? We would have to have an army of technicians with extensive training and specialized equipment which could also be ‘modified’ at will. Again, If public trust is desired high tech methods fall way short of the mark.
If Atmel or some other flash manufacturer wanted to make a chip that looked just like a 28F256 but had some other goofy hidden features, I suppose it would be technically possible for them to do so, but I really can't imagine it happening. No company that wants to stay in business would dare do such a thing to its own products. A foreign company might make rigged counterfeit devices, but the engineering required would be significant, the overall required conspiracy would be huge, the likelihood of detection would be high, and the probability of success would be low.
I'd rather have a nation of We the People who can all witness, judge, and have complete confidence in the fairness of the voting process.
Unless the socialists prevent constitutionalists from getting a technical education, what's the problem? It doesn't matter that every voter is able to inspect the process completely, provided that there is at least one technically competent person the voter trusts who can inspect things. To be sure, some people might try to sow discord by suggesting to some groups of people that they shouldn't trust any technical people, but such people can never be appeased regardless.
I suggest it DOES matter. That position is rather condescending.
provided that there is at least one technically competent person the voter trusts who can inspect things
It would seem to be just short of a miracle, especially in the current social atmosphere, to find such a person. (Actually it would require MANY such persons.)
I realize there are those who disdain all technical people, however we are dealing with something that has a significant effect on all people: the election of our representatives and some laws. A non-technical simple method would be trusted by more people than the technical method could ever be.
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