Wednesday, July 28, 2004
How's It Hanging, Chad?
The best, most auditable voting technology seems to be punch cards or fill in the circle cards. The technology is simple, easily understood and subject to manual audit. I am very suspicious that the whole "hanging chad" controversy was a big smokescreen intended to create a demand for touch screen voting.
The real controversy in Florida was the disenfranchisement of thousands of black voters and not punch card voting. To me one solution to the hanging "chad" problem would have been to run these punch cards through vote tabulating machines an agreed upon amount of times, 5 for example. Election officials noted that when punch cards are run multiple times through the machines chad debris increased, meaning loose, hanging chads would fall. Loosened, dimpled chads would have fallen off with no favoritism for one side or the other. So called No votes, where it appeared that the voter did not attempt to remove any chad for an office, would be minimized and of course some ballots would be lost due to duplicate votes for the same office. The result would be that voters who mistakenly dimpled two chads for the same office may not have their intended vote counted but the controversy surrounding trying to determine intent would be avoided. Gore may still have lost due to the willful disenfranchisement of thousands of voters in minority communities but then that would have been the major story it should have been from the start.
This article from the NY Times is a great illustration of why fear of election fraud is not lefty paranoia. All Americans should be concerned about protecting the integrity of our elections process. If we cannot have faith in the result of our elections our very democracy is in grave danger. [I include portions of the article due to the Times practice of making you pay for access to the whole article once they archive it.]
Almost all the electronic records from the first widespread use of touch-screen voting in Miami-Dade County have been lost, stoking concerns that the machines are unreliable as the presidential election draws near.
The records disappeared after two computer system crashes last year, county elections officials said, leaving no audit trail for the 2002 gubernatorial primary. A citizens group uncovered the loss this month after requesting all audit data from that election.
... Like "black boxes" on airplanes, the electronic voting records on touch-screen machines list everything that happens from boot-up to shutdown, documenting in an "event log" when every ballot was cast. The records also include "vote image reports" that show for whom each ballot was cast. Elections officials have said that using this data for recounts is unnecessary because touch-screen machines do not allow human error. But several studies have suggested the machines themselves might err - for instance, by failing to record some votes.
After the 2002 primary, between Democratic candidates Janet Reno and Bill McBride, the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida conducted a study that found that 8 percent of votes, or 1,544, were lost on touch-screen machines in 31 precincts in Miami-Dade County. The group considered that rate of what it called "lost votes" unusually high.
When the CEO of Diebold, a major voting machine company, works for Bush's reelection campaign in Ohio and"guaranteed" a victory for Bush in Ohio and a sitting Republican Senator failed to disclose his holdings in the voting machine company, Election Systems and Software of Omaha, that tabulated 85% of votes cast in his last two Senate races and when these systems have been shown to be easily manipulated and many are not auditable is it paranoia to be worried about them or is it common sense? (On a side note, I found it interesting that once Chuck Hagel's voting machine controversy popped up he suddenly became an outspoken critic of some of Bush's policies - call me a conspiracy theorist (a lot of people do) but I have to wonder if this isn't a ploy to reduce our alarm over a very alarming situation.)
What a sad state of affairs it is when the US may need the UN to monitor our elections for fairness. That seems to be where we are now.
Several months ago I was upset about the number of people that I was meeting who seemed to believe that this administration would not leave office peacefully regardless of the will of the voters. I thought these people had gone way overboard when they claimed that the election would either be stolen, again or cancelled when Bush and company declared a terrorism related emergency. Wow, I thought I was a cynical but these folks were really nuts. Then we were introduced to DeForest Soaries and now I am not so sure. It is funny how life keeps surpassing fiction. As Lily Tomlin said, "No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up!"
We can and will stop these crooks if we keep our eyes open and never underestimate the corrupting power of power. At least we have mail in voting here in Oregon, with good old fashioned punch cards and fill in the ovals voting.
Keep the faith but keep in mind the words of The Gipper, "Trust, but verify". (Who'd a thunk I'd ever quote him favorably?) Maybe that reminder will encourage Republican voters to get worried about election fraud too since democrats are every bit as capable of stealing an election as republicans. This should not be a partisan issue.
The best, most auditable voting technology seems to be punch cards or fill in the circle cards. The technology is simple, easily understood and subject to manual audit. I am very suspicious that the whole "hanging chad" controversy was a big smokescreen intended to create a demand for touch screen voting.
The real controversy in Florida was the disenfranchisement of thousands of black voters and not punch card voting. To me one solution to the hanging "chad" problem would have been to run these punch cards through vote tabulating machines an agreed upon amount of times, 5 for example. Election officials noted that when punch cards are run multiple times through the machines chad debris increased, meaning loose, hanging chads would fall. Loosened, dimpled chads would have fallen off with no favoritism for one side or the other. So called No votes, where it appeared that the voter did not attempt to remove any chad for an office, would be minimized and of course some ballots would be lost due to duplicate votes for the same office. The result would be that voters who mistakenly dimpled two chads for the same office may not have their intended vote counted but the controversy surrounding trying to determine intent would be avoided. Gore may still have lost due to the willful disenfranchisement of thousands of voters in minority communities but then that would have been the major story it should have been from the start.
This article from the NY Times is a great illustration of why fear of election fraud is not lefty paranoia. All Americans should be concerned about protecting the integrity of our elections process. If we cannot have faith in the result of our elections our very democracy is in grave danger. [I include portions of the article due to the Times practice of making you pay for access to the whole article once they archive it.]
Almost all the electronic records from the first widespread use of touch-screen voting in Miami-Dade County have been lost, stoking concerns that the machines are unreliable as the presidential election draws near.
The records disappeared after two computer system crashes last year, county elections officials said, leaving no audit trail for the 2002 gubernatorial primary. A citizens group uncovered the loss this month after requesting all audit data from that election.
... Like "black boxes" on airplanes, the electronic voting records on touch-screen machines list everything that happens from boot-up to shutdown, documenting in an "event log" when every ballot was cast. The records also include "vote image reports" that show for whom each ballot was cast. Elections officials have said that using this data for recounts is unnecessary because touch-screen machines do not allow human error. But several studies have suggested the machines themselves might err - for instance, by failing to record some votes.
After the 2002 primary, between Democratic candidates Janet Reno and Bill McBride, the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida conducted a study that found that 8 percent of votes, or 1,544, were lost on touch-screen machines in 31 precincts in Miami-Dade County. The group considered that rate of what it called "lost votes" unusually high.
When the CEO of Diebold, a major voting machine company, works for Bush's reelection campaign in Ohio and"guaranteed" a victory for Bush in Ohio and a sitting Republican Senator failed to disclose his holdings in the voting machine company, Election Systems and Software of Omaha, that tabulated 85% of votes cast in his last two Senate races and when these systems have been shown to be easily manipulated and many are not auditable is it paranoia to be worried about them or is it common sense? (On a side note, I found it interesting that once Chuck Hagel's voting machine controversy popped up he suddenly became an outspoken critic of some of Bush's policies - call me a conspiracy theorist (a lot of people do) but I have to wonder if this isn't a ploy to reduce our alarm over a very alarming situation.)
What a sad state of affairs it is when the US may need the UN to monitor our elections for fairness. That seems to be where we are now.
Several months ago I was upset about the number of people that I was meeting who seemed to believe that this administration would not leave office peacefully regardless of the will of the voters. I thought these people had gone way overboard when they claimed that the election would either be stolen, again or cancelled when Bush and company declared a terrorism related emergency. Wow, I thought I was a cynical but these folks were really nuts. Then we were introduced to DeForest Soaries and now I am not so sure. It is funny how life keeps surpassing fiction. As Lily Tomlin said, "No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up!"
We can and will stop these crooks if we keep our eyes open and never underestimate the corrupting power of power. At least we have mail in voting here in Oregon, with good old fashioned punch cards and fill in the ovals voting.
Keep the faith but keep in mind the words of The Gipper, "Trust, but verify". (Who'd a thunk I'd ever quote him favorably?) Maybe that reminder will encourage Republican voters to get worried about election fraud too since democrats are every bit as capable of stealing an election as republicans. This should not be a partisan issue.
Comments:
Post a Comment
