Djamila said:
Bosnia and Herzegovina has issued tenders for electronic voting booths and it's generating quite a significant public backlash, who do not trust the government nor partisan corporations to collect and count votes electronically.
The media has interviewed experts from across Europe and in North America and all of them listed the American election system as an example of what a democracy doesn't want - where partisan (Republican) companies manufacteur the electronic voting booths, patent their interal workings as a company secret so no authentic audit can be performed, and in some cases do not even issue a paper trail in case of problems.
Representatives from Canada and Germany openly said it's completely plausible that the previous few American elections have been decided by these companies, and there is no way the American people are, or could ever be, wise to the problem because of the regulations.
Is this true? How true is it? If it's true at all, why do people tolerate it?
Be up in arms, and do NOT settle for this system.
It's true. People are not happy about it. But they'll have to get the people in power to change it, and why would those people listen to complaints, unless they had some serious chance of being tossed out of power? It helps people in power stay in power.
btw, I'm a poll manager in Georgia, and yup, we use the Diebold machines.
Here's the only "paper trail" we get. On each machine:
1. A printout of totals before we open the poll (the zero report, because it had better start with zeros for everyone).
2. Three copies of totals printed after we close the polls. One is attached to the zero report. The other two are separated and are copies that go to the county offices and the state.
3. Three copies of "accumulator" totals, which are the totals for all machines at the polling place. Two copies go on to the country, and one is taped on the polling place before we leave.
There is additional paperwork meant to check and balance the number of votes on the machines. The totals for voters on the machines have to match the number of voters on the numbered list, which must match the bound voter certificates.
But the real problem is not in this area. It's that anything at all can happen in the black box machines between poll opening and closing.
Our county election officials are really quite competent, and they do extensive testing of every machine prior to an election, and that would *probably* reveal anything strange turning up in results.
Of course, no one sees the source code, so it would be terribly easy to have the software set up to detect the date and run through a slightly different bit of code when its actually election day. The most rank junior programmer would have no difficulty writing that bit of code.
In the last presidential election there were multiple voters in Ohio complaining that even though they voted for one particular candidate, the final "here's who you want to vote for" page showed the opponent. So they'd go back and select their candidate again, and the final page would *still* have the opponent listed. Some voters did this as much as 3 times before their vote actually "took." You can imagine how many voters didn't take the time to review their choice before they touched Cast Ballot.
I know there are people who think including an individual slip would solve the problem, but I'm not entirely sure how that would work, given how the machines work. If the slip comes up with someone the person didn't want to vote for, there is no way to back out the ballot that has been cast already. There is no advantage at all if the person takes the slip away, for there would be nothing left for us to use for a recount.
The only use I can see in it is during a recount, we might actually have enough detail of a paper trail if people left the slips with us in a separate sealed box that we had to return to the elections office. In the case of a recount, those slips had better match what the accumulator tape says. That would be enough to make it worthwhile, but until I hear some bright person come up with how you can back out a vote the voter claims is incorrect, I can't see it's enough.
And even if we solve this problem, there are time-honoured ways to suppress voter turnout in areas.
The classic is to send too few machines to a poll for a number of voters. This makes for long lines, and people leave. In other areas where the votes go your way, you send more than enough machines, so there's no waiting.
Or you can always hire some hack firm to scrub voter lists of supposed felons, many of which are most certainly not felons, many of which are bad data to begin with, and many of which don't even live in the state or have names that don't even match. If you can toss 90,000 voters off the voter rolls, and the happen to mostly be African-American, this will work wonders for any candidate in a particular party. It seems to have worked quite well in Florida, and didn't even require tampering with machines.
The old ways still work.
Am I confident about the accuracy of voting in my county? Actually, yes. I know the team that works on this, and while they are really scrupulous about voicing NO political opinions, still they are a diverse lot in many ways, and so provide a check on any one or two of them being able to do anything stupid. Plus, Maxine is just one of the most straightforward people I've ever met, and that's one broad you just don't get past.
However, I do NOT have such confidence in the elections offices in other counties in Georgia. There are counties where a certain group is "in charge" and there is every possibility of some of them deciding to take advantage, though it's more likely they use the time-honoured methods than newfangled ones.
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Oh my! Just on a lark I went to check
www.blackboxvoting.org, and I must say, they just lost all credibility with me. There's a story about the primary in DeKalb County this summer and how all sorts of irregularities were supposedly going on in my county.
The info is from Cynthia McKinney, and sure as **** is news to me. And we poll managers, we do talk outside of election day.
Believe me, if there was gossip to be had like this, I woulda heard it. The stupidest thing that happened at the last election is some newbie poll manager didn't realize there was some setup to do the day before the poll opened, and had a heckuva time getting opened by 7am.
Cynthia McKinney, and I'm being charitable here, is a fruitcake.
She's burned that she lost yet another primary. The last time that happened, she first blamed it on the Jews, and went down the list her bigoted mind could think of, and eventually claimed it was the Hindus that lost her the primary.
I don't suppose it ever occured to her that her racism turned off even the most diehard liberals, that her stupid comments after 9/11 turned off pretty much anyone with a brain cell in their head, regardless of ethnic background or creed, and that her recent assault of a DC police officer sort of finished it for anyone else. Oh, not to mention she pays homeless people a trifling sum to stand around all day on election day with signs. Uh...not exactly in keeping with wage standards, is it Ms. M?
Uh...right Cynthia...lots of voting fraud here in DeKalb County, but ONLY because you lost another primary. When you won, that was fine with you.
You really should stop smoking that stuff.
