Lever machines, while accurate as long as they were in working order, were indeed subject to potential tampering by someone who was very knowledgeable of their inner workings. OCR on the other hand, allows for a full paper recount in the case of any issues, perceived or otherwise.
Our problem isn’t just that it’s not tamper-proof (while improvements in that area are quite possible, that’s not really a possible standard to meet universally), but several issues. Tampering can now occur in many forms and on many scales, without requiring a large conspiracy of people. This wasn’t true of the old lever machines, which would required a skilled person to manually change the register on each machine individually. The politicization of the process, such as rushing to certify obviously bad numbers, if they fall a certain way, manufacturers promising to deliver elections to specific candidates (I’m pretty sure Shoup and Myers never did this), non-certified patches, poor built-in security, lack of an easily added paper-trail, etc.
Not everyone, including some government agencies, consider the new solution to have reached the “good” yet.
I don’t recall anyone claiming that a paper trail wasn’t possible with the new machines. I do recall many claims that they weren’t universally installed with the machines. I’d love to see your cite that claims otherwise.
The machines may have problems, and as the article says, human error is likely. But the fact that elections are conducted county by county means that it would be pretty hard for someone to orchestrate some kind of change in the voting outcome. You’d have to get hackers to get to every machine, in every precinct, and prevent that from becoming known to any uninterested person. Conspiracies don’t work very well when a lot of people are involved. Also, what would Diebold have against Obama? Maybe the overall results were simply because Clinton is a senator from N.Y.
I think that the need for a “paper trail” as a safeguard against electoral fraud is overblown. From Ballot Box 13 to the dead Chicagoans who came out big for Kennedy, plenty of shady voting has been done on paper. It seems to me that it’s not the technology of voting that matters, but rather having an accountable process for overseeing the count.
http://www.bradblog.com/ Brad has been following the voting machine mess from back when it was just a rumor. Sadly the rumors are true.
All I want is a fair and equal election count. Human error would not likely be allowed to continue if it found Obama had zero votes. It then becomes something else.
Oh, bull. Have you ever worked with these machines?
You can fiddle them with just a toothpick. Even easier, you can split one of the small pencils which are conveniently provided right there for the polling place workers.
That probably would not work on a new, tight machine – but there are NO NEW machines! All of them are decades old, and worn, and often out of adjustment.
Despite that possibility, nothing indicates that any fraud happened. Much more likely is that the poll workers wrote down the wrong numbers in the rush to get early results. That is fairly common, given that they have often been working for 12-14 hours that day, and are frequently older people, too. That’s why the system is designed with another check to catch this before the results are certified. Which is exactly what happened here.
I certainly agree that paper ballots, with OCR scanners/ counters seems the best system currently available. It’s what we use here in Hennepin County, and I think it works quite well.