Posted on 07/31/2003 4:13:06 AM PDT by kattracks
What’s really going here is that democrats know electronic voting will result in more Republican voting. It can also be much more secure than any standard poll voting system in which you do not even have to provide ID to register or vote. Additionally, electronic voting creates a record and records can be used to prosecute fraud. All these issues would work against Democrats which is why they will do anything to slow down the future.
You're missing a critical difference.
In banking, there are two parties to every transaction, and it's a zero-sum system. Any fraud perpetrated on the system to benefit someone will result in someone else getting shafted, noticing it, and raising a big stink. The paper trail (or electronic version thereof) can be followed to find where the flow of money went haywire.
But in electronic voting, votes can be "created" out of thin air, or mutated from votes for candidate X into votes for candidate Y, and no one will be the wiser. 100 voters go into the booths and come out, 100 votes come out of the machine marked "70 for X, 30 for Y" -- how exactly do you propose to audit it to verify that that's how the people actually voted? How can any voter verify that his vote actually got registered and counted? There's no "bank statement" to balance.
Worse, banking is tracked so that records are kept every time a dollar changes hands, recording from whom and to whom it moved. Voting, on the other hand, is *purposely* anonymized, so that a given vote *can't* be traced back to the person who cast it. There's no way to audit it in order to make sure that Joe's vote didn't get "altered" somewhere along the line.
I can think of some ways to help close some of the obvious loopholes using crytpographic certificates and so on, but the point is that the current crop of electronic voting machines are still in the stone-age with respect to properly safeguarding the accuracy of their vote counts, compared to the *very* sophisticated work that would be necessary to even match the tamper-resistance of a physical locked box of paper ballots kept in plain sight of bipartisan poll workers.
And for every high-tech solution, there are going to be a dozen unforeseen high-tech loopholes. Just ponder the frequent security alerts and patches for every operating system or web browser from any software company (and no, Microsoft is hardly alone in that regard). It's the nature of the beast, not the oversight of any particular company.
True, but it also gives the rats a ready-made alibi for losing. They smell rat defeat in 2004, and they're already crowing "the fix is in" with electronic voting so that Bush can "cheat again". They can't get over losing in 2000 and they won't admit losing in 2004 either...they'll just blame their next "stolen election" on technology and eevil pubs.
Now having said that, I DO think electronic voting should create a paper or physical record of every vote, and that any electronic votes which cannot be verified against that paper record should be discarded. I don't want EITHER side to be able to invent votes, and just in case there's a recount (shudder), you can't recount bits in RAM. If we ever come to another 2000-style election debacle and there aren't even any chads to spill, God help us all. There won't be a legitimate winner and the catfight will go on for months...years...until the Supreme Court stops it and then aww, there y'all go again.
I don't have time now to go into it in any depth, but it's pretty simple to "adjust" the systems to count more "ballots" for one party/candidate than another. Just add a few at a time, maybe 1.1 *counted* votes for every 1 *actual* votes, rounded up to the nearest whole number....
You are being filmed when you vote (log's a picture of the voter for comparison, and prevents voter fraud)
We could mail special cards to all registered voters (prevents voter fraud)
It distributes the possible locations where people can vote
And it increases the number of locations people must cover to intimidate voters
BITS
I'm with you. The dims are using reverse psychology.
Hacking a computer program to ,for instance, add 1 dim vote for every 5 repub votes would be too easy.
It's who counts the votes, not who votes.
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