Paper Trails At The Voting Booth
E. J. Dionne tackles the controversy over electronic voting machines that has arisen since their rushed implementation following the 2000 presidential election. Dionne argues that a little paranoia isn't always a bad thing:
Sometimes, paranoids are right. And sometimes even when paranoids are wrong, it's worth considering what they're worried about. I speak here of all who are worried sick that those new, fancy high-tech voting systems can be hacked, fiddled with and otherwise made to record votes that aren't cast or fail to record votes that are.
I do not pretend to know how large a threat this is. I do know that it's a threat to democracy when so many Americans doubt that their votes will be recorded accurately. And I also know that smart, computer-savvy people are concerned about these machines.
The perfectly obvious thing is for the entire country to do what a number of states have already done: require paper trails so that if we have a close election or suspect something went wrong, we have the option to go back and check the results.
For most of us, the perfectly obvious thing was to question why a balloting process that had been in use for decades had to be tossed aside simply because one party didn't like the outcome of the race. In California, we had used the butterfly ballot for decades; we had one in every election in which I voted. The punch-card ballots made it very easy to ensure that my vote was recorded correctly, and booth instructions warned voters to check that all chads got properly cleared from the ballot before filing it.
All of a sudden, because of one close election, American voters suddenly discovered that the venerable punch-card ballot was the gravest threat to democracy since Huey Long and J. Edgar Hoover. Rather than comprehend that every election will have its share of voters who do not follow instructions, reformers insisted that our freedom hinged on our ability to provide a voting system that would protect us from our own incompetence. These reformers -- including many of the same people who now object to the electronic voting machines -- proclaimed the electronic machine the savior of the electoral process.
However, the reformers didn't take into consideration that the system they hailed simply wasn't ready for prime time. Diebold rushed it to market, unmindful of security problems and internal errors in its programming. It occasionally misrecorded votes, and voters had no way to check its output. For most products, this would mean more R&D and a few more trials to determine reliability. In time, this could have been an excellent product -- and the punch-card system had enough reliability to give it that time, under normal circumstances. Instead, reformers insisted that local governments buy these new and flawed systems by the thousands, wasting millions of dollars and ruining Diebold's reputation.
Dionne is right, but he fails to mention the paranoia that fueled this laughable cycle of so-called electoral reform. Paranoia is never a good basis for public policy, and neither is panic. The reason we find ourselves in the situation Dionne rightly decries is because a bunch of sore losers convinced a large number of people to buy into their paranoia and forced a change that turned out badly.
As for me, I live in Minnesota, where we use an optical-scan ballot. We use a black pen to fill in the circles for our desired candidates, and then we put the ballot into a reader. If the ballot has an error, it spits it out and we re-do it. If not, we see the reader accept the ballot and we leave, secure in the knowledge that our vote will be counted. Maybe the rest of the country might catch up with us by the time we host the Republican National Convention in 2008.
Posted by Captain Ed at
06:34 AM |
Comments (25) "I would tell the dems to take the issue and stuff it. They fabricated this crisis in democracy out of whole cloth when they got caught ballot box stuffing in 2000 in Florida. The only real problem, now that we know we have > 12,000,000 illegal residents of this country is voter identity fraud. The dems have resisted every attempt at reform of this real problem while they pretend outrage over the current problem. The normal background noise of the dems stealing elections, as they did in Washington state, is bad enough. The tradition of ballot stuffing in the African American areas is by now old news.
The overwhelming of our system due to the dem's encouraging non-citizen voters to vote is, however new. Until they get a conscience and follow it and permit real voter IDs, they should get nothing."
"Voter fraud may be an issue," (yes, I believe that's quite true, and
Gateway Pundit is the genius at keeping track of it, and
not just in St. Louis. Voter fraud does seem to be a predominantly leftish proclivity)Links to this post:
"Bush is eerily calm..." There are seeds of all sorts of ideas being planted in these final weeks before the election, so that no matter what actually sprouts up on election day (or post-election) each story harvested can claim to have been "predicted" by someone. Politics in the 21st century is pure insanity. In my morbid curiosity, I cannot look away.
Crossposted at The Anchoress Online.
Posted by Anchoress at
01:41 PM |
Comments (18)
"Oh, yeah. You can see all the chauffeurs being sent out to man the barricades."
U.S. digs for vote-machine links to Hugo Chávez--The whole point of this tale seems to be to discredit ALL voting machine devices, by tying them to questionable sources. If not the evil Republicans, then to the whacko leftist dictator of a corrupt South American country, an attempt to enlist the Republican proponents of the electronic voting devices.
The voting machines as now administered tend to make a more honest vote possible. A simple fraud like stuffing ballot boxes has become much more difficult.
It would almost seem as if the Miami Herald does not WANT fraud taken out of elections. AT least, fraud they cannot approve of.
October 27th, 2006
From the DNC's Associated Press:
![](http://www.sweetness-light.com/wp-content/photos/Elections/56760b93cf.jpg)
ACORN accused of more bogus election forms
Posted on Wed, Oct. 25, 2006
CLAYTON, Mo. - St. Louis County Election officials claim hundreds of fraudulent voter address changes have been turned in by ACORN, a group that's been criticized for its voter sign-up work in Missouri.
St. Louis County's Republican elections director Joseph Goeke said if a county voter does not get a polling-place notification card in the mail right before the election, the address could have been changed behind their back.
Election Board employees estimate hundreds of fraudulent address changes were submitted.
The address changes included forged signatures and are among questionable or fraudulent voter registration cards submitted to the county within the past couple of months.
County officials told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that most of the suspicious registrations and address changes were submitted by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).
Similar fraudulent voter registration cards have turned up this month in St. Louis city and this week in Kansas City, as well as other states, including Ohio.
The cases are often similar. Voter registration cards were forged for a dead person, had false signatures and change of addresses or incorrect and missing personal information, Goeke said.
ACORN has registered hundreds of thousands of legitimate voters across the country, paying workers about $8 an hour in some cases...
Every year the folks from ACORN do everything they can to steal our elections. And when they aren't rigging elections, they are stirring up trouble with their endless protest demonstrations.
So why is ACORN is one of the largest taxpayer funded programs out there? Why are they not only tolerated but funded by our government?
Just think what more ACORN will get in government largess with the Congress in control of the Democrats.
And what more they will be able to accomplish.
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