"Monopoly Looms on Electronic Voting" by Lisa Pease (9-16-09 Consortium News)

[bobthedrummer]

"While we've been concentrating on the healthcare debate, the economy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, another story important to American democracy has gotten inadequate attention: a single company is poised to monopolize the counting of over 75 percent of the nation's votes."

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/091609a.html

[debbierlus]

1. He who casts the votes decide nothing....he who counts the votes decide everything

It should be illegal for any private entity to own voting machines or have anything to do with the implementation and execution of our elections.

Fascism at its finest.

[Octafish]

2. Gee. The Christian Reconstructionists will be counting the majority of votes.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x423122

Wowza!

[Nederland]

3. There should be an open source solution

...assuming there isn't one already.

[robinlynne]

4. or how about a public solution? handcounting in front of the public.

[Nederland]

7. Won't work in the US

There are simply too many things to vote on, the ballots would be falling apart by the time you were finished.

[robinlynne]

8. Puulese. We did a test run in LA county, it was faster, better, cheaper, easier. no problems at all,

really. you do it at the precinct, before you send the ballots to the central county headquarters.

[Nederland]

11. How many things were on the ballot?

In Colorado where I live, there can be 30+ items on the ballot.

[robinlynne]

13. WE only counted 7 races, but it took about AN HOUR. 3 people. You take one race.

make piles. count them. 3 people to make sure it is correct. write it into a sheet. done. next race. Instead of counting a county together, you count one precinct. smaller number of ballots, less chance of switching and fraud. If you want to count again at the county level, fine.

[Nederland]

14. How many ballots? (nt)

[robinlynne]

16. a precinct has up to 900 voters. or 900 registered voters. dont remember the turnout, but whatever

the turnout was for 2006. That's why counting would be at the precinct level, not a central place. Well, that's not why. they why is that by counting at precinct, fraud is more difficult.

basically you make piles. Then double count each pile.

[Nederland]

18. Response

Well, let's say that over half the registered voters actually voted (generous assumption in a mid-year election) and you had 500 ballots. So it took 3 people one hour to count 500 ballots, for seven races. If you implemented that nationwide, where 130 million people voted in 2008, it would require 3/4 million people to count the vote--and that assumes that most places have around seven races/issues to vote on.

Do you really think a system that involves 3/4 million people will produce accurate results?

There is a reason that states choose to adopt machines to count votes.

[robinlynne]

9. ahh. Are you a member of OVC? The only people, besides republicons, against

hand counting paper ballots....

[Nederland]

10. No

I'm not against hand counted ballots as a backup, and I'm in favor of a paper trail. However, I'm realistic. Hand counting a ballot with something like 30 items on it is simply not realistic.

[damntexdem]

5. Don't prevent the monopoly on e-voting, outlaw it.

Monopolized or not, e-voting is a threat to democracy.

[MinM]

6. k & r for lp n/t

[Orsino]

12. Congress cannot fix this problem now.

They're too busy not fixing health care.

[bobthedrummer]

15. kick

[bobthedrummer]

17. and another...

[Overseas]

19. Kicking especially because the professional right wing bullying may be

designed to create the impression that dissatisfaction with President Obama is higher than it really is.

Astroturfed events have been covered by our corporate broadcast media as though they were "genuine grass roots" things, so the public may believe that they represent more than the Republican Right.

Anti-healthcare reform messaging has been encouraged to oppose all kinds of "big government" (even though there was nary a peep from the 9/12ers when the Bush Gang enlarged the government significantly during their reign).

So that's why I'm beginning to worry about election integrity again. We need paper ballots, counted by hand. Not electronic voting with all the problems we've documented. (please see http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7417)

If we don't make sure we have paper ballots with auditable paper trails, the votes could be easily flipped again in 2010. I can see news chat pundits saying "well, the public was really against big government so they voted in more Republicans this time." "Well, Democrats were mad that their representatives didn't push more for Single Payer." And they can dig out the ridiculous arguments they used to undermine confidence in exit polling that they trotted out on election night 2004. Along with the lame stuff about the US preferring the torturer you want to have a beer with to the boring war hero who doesn't go hunting regularly.