We’ve posted numerous articles in the past on how easy it is to rig these machines, how Diebold’s president talked about handing Ohio to the Republicans and so on. I wonder who would be president if no one had used these machines in 2000 and 2004?
Strickland backs voting overhaul
Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner continued stripping the mystery from Ohio’s electronic voting machines Tuesday with a behind-the-scenes look at the state’s recent groundbreaking security study.
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“This country has gone through two presidential elections where there have been, I believe, legitimate concerns raised about the fairness and the integrity of those elections,” he said. “I don’t think we should go through a third presidential election and have those questions out there.”
Now Colorado is ready to toss voting machines that fail to be secure enough. Any bets on if next year’s election will feature a fair and honest count?
If Paul Allen gave some Open Source geeks a couple million dollars, could they come up with a fraud proof voting machine?
Seems to me that a ballot marking machine is the solution.
You would vote by touch screen and then the machine would print out a human and machine readable ballot.
The voter would visually check the ballot for accuracy before submitting it. If he/she found a mistake, it could be torn up and they would vote again.
The marking machine would tabulate non-official election night results but the printed ballot is authoritative.
The OCR machine could be off-the-shelf hardware. The final, ultimate authority would be a hand count, if an election is close or suspicious.
Wouldn’t a system like this make everybody but creepy, Karl Rove wannabe conservatives happy?
#3: I could write software that would be better than that, and I haven’t done any programming for a decade. It ain’t that tough an application. Pretty much any software on the computer in front of you is more complicated than voting software needs to be.
Think of it this way. Millions of sales and credit card transactions are processed via browsers daily without anyone stealing that data. If your computer running a browser accessing a website can be secure, how difficult is it to make a standalone or networked box secure?
If voting machine software is vulnerable to attack it is for one of two reasons: shear stupidity or the developer wanted it that way. Not much in between.
I think we should just flip a coin, probably get better results anyway. And it would be a helluva lot cheaper.
Bad day for the republican party in Ohio. I guess they can’t win any precincts by 150k votes when there are only 4k people in the precinct anymore…
“It’s not the people who vote that count. It’s the people who count the votes.” (Popularly credited to Josef Stalin)
They should do the vote fraud the classic style: send the registration papers to the Democrat voters too late or don’t let black voters vote on the excuse that they have a criminal record or that their papers are missing.
It worked in Florida.
This is such an important issue that I try to surf to http://www.bradblog.com every day or two just to keep up with the happening and decisions of elected officials (most quite alarming alas!).
One particular thing of note about this story is that the famed DIEBOLD machines (you remember, those easily hackable ones) have been the only ones that PASSED the Colorado muster tests. I was shocked. Shocked I tell you. Er wait – no, come to think of it, I kind of expected that it would be the logical choice for good government … (namely, to have one easily hackable system put in as many places possible instead of having to deal with so many different company products – that makes it too hard to do proper government planning /* end snark mode */
I feel that hand penciled paper ballots should be used. Make them so they may be readily inserted into a OCR. Then instant tallying may be done and the paper ballots kept as a definitive back-up.
The latest and greatest technologies are not always the best technologies.
On the same subject, why is it so important that all winners be declared by a specific date? In my opinion, it is better to be accurate than fast. If it takes an extra couple of weeks, then so be it.
Here’s a radical concept for you: Mark your votes on a piece of paper using a pen. Count the votes by hand. It’s really not so complicated.
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