Losing Elections' Paper Trail: Crisis Waiting To Happen

[kpete]

Losing Elections' Paper Trail: Crisis Waiting To Happen
By Dick Polman, The Philadephia Inquirer
October 23, 2006

The electronic issue has been largely ignored. If either party wins in a blowout, that may continue. But if the vote is close...


This op/ed appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer. It is reposted with permission of the author.




If you're worried that the newfangled electronic voting machines are a threat to the integrity of our democracy, rest assured: You're not just being paranoid.



This is a worrisome topic to introduce on the eve of crucial midterm elections, but since the Republican Congress didn't bring it up over the summer - preferring, instead, to spend precious weeks showcasing dead-end hot-button issues, such as gay marriage and flag burning - we'll do so here. After all, we're only talking about whether 21st-century Americans can trust the high-tech process by which they choose their leaders.



This isn't a particularly sexy issue. It only rarely seeps into the popular culture (comic Bill Maher has quipped that "some 13-year-old hacker in Finland is going to hand the presidency to Kylie Minogue"), and at first one might be tempted to outfit the handwringers with tinfoil hats and send them on an all-expenses-paid trip to visit Oliver Stone.



But that impulse is quickly overridden by the weight of the empirical evidence, which shows that the newest touch-screen machines - which will serve roughly 40 percent of the 2006 electorate - are about as reliable as Hal, the computer that wrought havoc in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.



For starters, these machines can be hacked all too easily, but that's only the most dramatic finding. More often - and this has already happened in a number of states, including Maryland and New Mexico - they lose votes, fail to register votes, "switch" votes between competing candidates, count votes twice, and simply freeze before voters can vote.

more at:
http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1918&Itemid=26

[Kurovski]

1. Keeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeck!

:kick: & R

[Imagevision]

2. If Dems win big you can expect repugs to demand recount - this is

a given...

[BeFree]

3. That is a big if...

....the real question is what will we do if the Publicans win big?

But lets say the Dems do win big and they do demand a recount? Well, we do the same. What everyone will then know is that recounts are impossible. I look forward to that, but I doubt anything like that will ever happen.

I say impossible only for the 40% of machines with no paper trail. You can't recount a machine, it just tells you what it told you the first time.

[The Brethren]

4. Electronic voting needs to be removed

Without being to verify that the system is working correctly and accurately, then we can't say it is a fair election and w/o that we don't have a democracy. More problems have already snow up the process in this election alone. It's obviously too late to stop them by the 7th, but that doesn't mean the issue shouldn't be addressed...far from it.