Officials Deem Electronic Voting Unreliable
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Elections, TechnologyThat’s right. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission has reported that nobody can ensure the security of these machines and so we should have paper trail…but an old kind of paper trail.
And can I just say…it’s about damn time!
The assessment by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, one of the government’s premier research centers, is the most sweeping condemnation of such voting systems by a federal agency.In a report hailed by critics of electronic voting, NIST said that voting systems should allow election officials to recount ballots independently from a voting machine’s software. The recommendations endorse “optical-scan” systems in which voters mark paper ballots that are read by a computer and electronic systems that print a paper summary of each ballot, which voters review and elections officials save for recounts.
Hell, I’ve used optical scan most times and have always thought that’s the way we should go. And yes, that means I think we need to collectively abandon the electronic machines, go back to optical-scan and be done with it. It’s realiable, there’s a clear paper trail and no worries about hanging chads. Of course we spent a lot of money on those Diebold machines, but that doesn’t mean we should use them.
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December 4th, 2006 at 12:13 pm
HI
Thanks for the blog, getting more accurate vote counts
seems to be the right thing to do, President Bush was correct in one of his African speeches when he said the only acceptable form of government is democracy. He also defined democracy, in that speech, as one vote one-person rule. This requires every vote be counted and every vote be counted correctly. In the republic of Ireland, they seem to have a very reliable paper ballot system without using machines. They refuse to use all those e-voting machines they bought a few years ago and have in storage. The same kind that were shown to be unreliable in Holland’s elections where the wrong results were given.
It takes more time to count in Ireland because each ballot box is opened and votes counted in front of both partisan and neutral vote observers using hand counting.
It takes even more time because they start with an overall total count with out regard to whom the votes are for because of proportional representation. By this method, votes for a person are counted until he has enough votes to get a seat.
If 10 seats are being contested as soon as one candidate gets ten percent he is elected and the ballots of other people who chose him continued to be counted using their second choice as their first choice. This way more peoples votes count in making up the legislature. If you voted for a person who already has enough votes to be elected by the time your vote is counted then your second choice is counted as your vote in that particular race.
They do this to overcome legislative districting maps that, like in Pennsylvania, packs many voters of one party into one district where the majority wins the seat by a wide margin, but allows minority parties to win other districts by small majorities. Minorities in these cases can win majorities in the national and local legislatures, and control of public laws and policies. This is defiantly not one vote one-person democracy, because a minority of voters can control the legislature, laws and policy. The extra cost in time in getting the results, usually a day or two, results in one-person one vote government.