No one’s saying there’s evidence of that - THAT’S THE POINT. There’s no evidence there isn’t, either. If it’s just as easy to have a system with more evidence for or against any specific electioneering charge, why not prefer that system over the less secure system? Why prefer the more easily-rigged system?
I wish for a way to doublecheck the results on the E-voting machines as well.
I believe that the US 2000 Presidential election was close. Very close. The candidates were within 1% in 5 states: Florida, Iowa, New Mexico, Oregon, Wisconsin. The results were only seriously contested (in court) in Florida. (And within 3% in a few others.)
So, while I don’t think that, as yet, it’s possible to mount a nationwide scam, (due to the amount of folks that would need to be involved, any of whom might slip up, or just plain leak the news) things on a local level can get screwy.
With the paper ballots, you can look and see the hole/dimple/chad, and usually make a reasonable deduction as to the intent of the voter. But with just electronic bits, it’s a little tougher to lift fingerprints.
There are “margins of error” in any system humans devise (and Florida recount showed how even a small “acceptable error” causes discontent), and I am willing to live with the butterfly ballot’s flaws. The E-machine looks underdeveloped (security wise) at this point.
Those Diebold machines were tried here in San Diego county in the 2004 primary (?). What a circus. Some of the machines, after being left powered off for a period of time, would boot to a Windows desktop. There was no way for the untrained polling place volunteer to get those machines to run the voting software (the keyboards were either removed or locked, I forget which). It was then I went to the absentee ballot. (A “fill in the bubble” type.)
BrainGlutton, I’m not saying your cite isn’t neutral, but a 5 and 7 point lead is not an “odds on favorite” in any sort of election. If we’re now going to claim fraud every time a slim lead vanishes on election day, we may as well throw out the whole system.
What conspiracy theory is necessary here?
One need only observe the following facts:
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The Republicans at the national level are corrupt and have used dirty tricks to win elections in the past. (Choicepoint, voter suppression, etc.)
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Although there is no direct proof that Diebold electronic voting machines have been so used, there is indirect proof in the form of the fact that in Ohio in 2004, whenever the Diebold machines were known to err, they tend to err in favor of Republicans – over 90 percent of the time IIRC.
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There is considerable evidence that Diebold machines are hackable. What’s more, if the hacking is done right, is untraceable. How appealing can a voting machine BE to unscrupulous pols and their dirty tricksters?
Well, so ya got a national Republican party that likes to play the dirty tricks and extremely hackable voting machines manufactured by a noted Republican partisan who publicly promised to deliver Ohio to the Republicans in 2004. Jeebus, how STUPID would you have to be not to see the potential for some shenanigans there? It’s not a matter of being a fucking conspiracy theorist, it’s a matter of not being fucking STUPID. Which I heartily recommend to all who read this.
I do think the 2006 election is going to be much harder to steal, because so many elections are involved and so many Dems may win by large margins. As has been pointed out, it’s much safer and easier to steal an election when the votes are very close. The sensible thing to do, if you are going to steal votes at all, is steal only on the close races. This strategy might well work to help the Pubbies retain the Senate, but it won’t help them retain the House – too many seats. I think the Pubbies are arrogant enough that they think they can get away with stealing the not-so-close votes, too. If the Dems have any sense of self-preservation at all, they will be watching like hawks for this stuff.
Well, we are even then…I was wondering when the loony left contingent would get here. Thanks, as aways, for your insightful response rjung…classic, as usual. 
-XT
The thing is, though, the Republicans can easily eliminate the potential for Democrats to cry foul about election results by simply going along with legislation requiring paper trails. It would actually be good for them in the long run if the had the paper to wave in the Democrats’ face. I can’t think of any good reason for them to not want a paper trail unless they have something to hide.
Do you trust the Diebold machines, XT? If so, why?
A couple more articles to fan the flames. I, too, would prefer a more secure, more confidence-inspiring system.
Oklahoma has had optical scan ballots for a couple of decades now. I don’t understand why they’re not more widely used. They’re extremely easy to read and use (mark the ballot with a sharpie next to the name you want). They give automatic invalidation if the ballot is mismarked (so the voter can redo their ballot). They do an electronic count AND have a paper trail for recounts. Never heard of any problems with recounts getting confused a la hanging chads - that sort of problem is caught at the validation level when the ballot is scanned.
Fast, easy, verifiable. Why use a poorly designed, poorly secured system over that?
I have noticed a depressing trend in beauracrats to grasp at high-tech, high priced (aka pork) solutions to public concerns…
Nor can I, and it’s kind of remarkable. Is there really an active fight against creating a paper trail? I haven’t followed the issue closely enough, I must admit, so I’m not all that familiar with the paper-trail argument and its content. It just seems like such an obvious thing to include. If I use an ATM, I can get a receipt, so if the bank moves a decimal place or something, I’ve got proof somebody or something screwed up. If a bank refused to give me a simple receipt for a transaction, I’d tell them they were crazy to expect my business, and I’d seriously suspect they relied on accounting errors to pad their bottom line.
How much effort is being put into fighting a paper trail? Is it that some Republicans don’t want a paper trail to bein place ever, or are they just saying don’t wait until the paper option is available before you implement electronic voting?
Still, though, I’m not sure how a paper trail helps all that much. Your receipt isn’t going to be worth anything once you remove it from the voting booth, and any paper list remaining in the polling station would be just as easily tampered with as the electronics, wouldn’t it? If you look at the results at the end of the day and the electronic tally differs from the paper tally, which is correct?
I suppose the voter would need to review the printout to see that it matched the voter’s choices, hit the “OK” button, or whatever, to make it official, and the printout would have to be on paper with a watermark like what we get on currency to prevent forgeries. I don’t think it would take much creativity to make it a reliable system, just money and willpower. I’d be all for funding it, since I can’t imagine many more important elements of our democracy than the integrity of the vote. This should simply be of the highest priority. It’s astonishing it isn’t.
Another reason why there isn’t more outcry against the machines: Americans as a whole still put a little too much faith in technology, forgetting that there are actual people behind it. Look at spam, phishing, 'Net rumors, “you are a winner” banner ads, etc.
A paper trail would likely show signs of tampering, at least as much as any of the various types of printed ballots do.
The more I understand how vulnerable these machines really are, the less comfortable I am with them. Not only in re the fraud aspect, but in simple software failure as well.
Do you trust them, John?
:dubious: No, electronic records are easier to tamper with than paper records, for obvious reasons. (Hence the phrase “ballot-box stuffing,” which clearly describes a physical action – and one difficult to get away with in public.)
An add-on to the electronic machines would print a paper sheet as soon as you registered your votes; it would be displayed under glass so you could verify it represented your actual choices; then it would drop into a sealed storage box in case a recount is called for. That system might not be flatly impossible to rig, but it would be much more difficult.
Well, in the optical scan system, I believe the ballots are numbered and each polling place has to account for all ballots (either used or ruined). I’m not sure if the ballot number is associated with the electronically recorded vote or not. It certainly could be, as the ballot number is not associated with a voter name (as far as I’ve seen), in order to preserve ballot confidentiality. It seems like it would be fairly difficult to change both the electronic record AND the associated physical ballots. Not that it couldn’t ever happen under any circumstances, just that it would be pretty difficult and require an actual conspiracy of multiple persons - which makes it extremely unlikely. I believe that the physical ballot is the final word in recounts. (This system dates from the old days, when many unsophisticated voters were fairly uncomfortable with “new technology”, so a paper recount process was vital to gaining public trust.)
The new electronic voting, from what I’ve read, is much easier to rig and much harder to detect if rigged.
Bot note that tampering with the electronic machines require that you be alone with the machines for some period of time. If I’m left alone with a paper list, I can swap it out for another one easily enough.
Yes, adding more conplexity will make it harder to hack, but it will also introduce more discrepancies. People wanted to go to electronic voting because of the problems caused by paper. If the whiners will promise not to whine about paper ballots, then I’m happy to go back to them.
You still didn’t answer my question-- if the electronic count and the paper count differ, then which one is right? You can’t just count on everyone checking their paper slip thru the glass.
Don’t get me wrong-- I want as clean an election as possible. But I think people have unrealistic expectations. “Count every vote” is a physical impossibility in a national election. I’d like to see a Gage Study done on various voting methods to see which one produces the least amount of errors. Constantly chasing perfection means you’re always tweaking things and always introducing new problems.
“Of course, reasonable argument is useless with you, because you are a loony liberal. Nonetheless, I will now present reasonable arguments, whlich you will disagree with, thus proving my point…”
You implying a unity of opinion that does not exist. You suggest that all of us who question e-voting universally believe in dark hugger-mugger conspiracies. Ain’t so, though it does permit you to bat aside their arguments without serious rebuttal.
Case in point. Says who? You? By what authority do you make such a grandly sweeping generalization?
Its impossible. Always be suspicious of that word, XT. All of your major money moguls use electronic means, with confidence that their money is safe. Do you imagine that the vote is more dear to our hearts than the Dollar Almighty is to the banker’s heart? If a banker can hold his dearest dollars safe and secure by these means, why shouldn’t we trust them? Assuming, of course, we apply the same relentlessly rigorous standards to protecting the sanctity of our vote that the banker applies to protecting His Precious.
You are welcome to think what you like, so long as we can remind you that you haven’t a shred of proof. Hasn’t bothered you yet, but we can hope.
Aww, that is so* adorable!* I love it how you guys like to think of yourself as tough-minded and realistic, and those who disagree with you are wooly-minded and naive. Seems to me that you tough-minded realists have been screwing the pooch bow-legged lately, so I’m not sure what advantage you claim. Just here, you’ve made a couple-three slanderous suggestions, without offering the slightest substantiation.
Anyway, we’ll save you a seat by the fire. Its a pretty easy song to sing, People’s Key of C. And if you haven’t played your harmonica in ten years, now is not the time.
Speaking strictly as a computer-coding geek, I’ll just mention that it’s not rocket science to create a Diebold-style electronic voting software program that’s tamper-proof and guaranteed trustworthy. Independent third-party audits, machine code checksums, redundant vote recordings in multiple encrypted databases, yadda yadda yadda.
One would think that if Diebold was truly interested in selling their systems as a reliable and trustworthy electronic voting system that they would eagerly embrace such safeguards, to reassure their customers – that is, the entire voting populace of the nation – of the quality of their product.
Instead, they’re content to stick to cheap-ass physical barriers that can be unlocked with a hotel minibar key and a continued air of “our stuff works, just trust us.” Makes you wonder…
Ditto Britain, where the PM can be declared while plenty of ballot boxes are still being recovered from godforsaken Scottish islands. Not to mention places like India or Russia, battling against hundreds of languages or a dozen time zones.