Florida electronic touchscreen voting system wipes out records of elections
 

Electronic records of some Florida elections wiped out in computer crash, officials say

We're all ready for November...damn if a few hanging chads is gonna keep them from appointing the president:glugglug

Jesus, we've been using ATM technology for years, why can't we make fucking voting machines that work?

we cant have that! kerry might actually win

Well, since they also made a law that forbids recounts in precincts using electronic voting machines, you have no way of proving who won if there's a dispute.

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercu...9255977.htm?1c

Wouldn't that be convenient :(

This is an interesting topic.


The US government made available funds to purchase electronic voting equipment which leave no paper trail. They required that states purchase this equipment in the calendar year 2003 in order to recieve this money. They provided a list of approved voting equipment vendors. However none of this equipment can be considered reliable or tamper proof. All remove the possibility of a true recount.

The leader of these three is created by a company called Diebold. Diebold has direct ties to GWB (a transaction regarding the Texas Rangers).
The owner of Diebold has indicated he plans to run for office in the next 8 years.

It seems scary to have a person involved in the programming of a computerized voting system run for office. One single easter egg in the system could change everything.

But even if you don't want to look at the conspiracy aspect of this, the flaws and problems with these systems are ridiculous.


"""We were caught. We apologize for that," Diebold Election Systems president Bobrosevich said of the mass failures of devices needed to call up digital ballots. Poll-workers in Alameda and San Diego counties hadn't been trained on ways around their failure, and San Diego County chose not to supply polls with backup paper ballots, crippling the largest rollout of e-voting in the nation on March 2. Unknown thousands of voters were turned away at the polls. "


http://www.blackboxvoting.org

I just posted about this in another thread, but I'll post here too.

There is NO reason not to add a paper trail to these machines. It'll protect against this sort of thing, and it'll also reassure the voter that their vote was accurately counted.

Touch screen voting sucks, but touch screen voting with a paper trail may actually be a pretty good thing.

evoting = trouble

corruption = death of democracy

Hell, they should let people vote from home via the internet. I'd even pay $1.00 for it. Imagine the money we could raise.

Well, if the transaction of money isn't secure in the US, then what is?

Thats the reason ATM's have been around forever with bugs worked out. It involves money, lol

I'm all for making voting easier for people. It should be as easy as possible for people to cast their ballots. Internet voting might be a tough one though.

You'd have to develop some secure way to verify people vote once, which could be done by issuing everyone some sort of code. But then you'd need to make sure the codes were secure, and people couldn't somehow cheat the system. It seems like internet or phone voting is really risky, and would have to have an extremely elaborate system designed to make it run smoothly and without fraud.

If people vote online or on the phone, then they might also make it more difficult to register to vote in the first place so make sure you really are who you say you are. Here in Arkansas, when we register have to give the normal information, but our drivers license number or the last four digits of our social security number. In addition to that, when we go to the poll to vote for the first time, we have to bring a utility bill in our name that confirms our address.

My fear is that with internet voting, many states would require all those documents when you initially register. This would be insane, and would totally ruin the ability for organizations to effectively do largescale voter registration.

I've worked with organizations that register voters door to door, outside of grocery stores, at concerts, at universities, etc. More requirements for registration would really hinder these registration efforts.

Woops, sorry, I went off on a tangent...
:(

I don't want e-voting in any form. So what if there's a paper trail if the computer crashes? If there are e-voting machines with a paper trail, it's only a matter of time before you hear reports of the computer count and paper counts not matching up.

If you are unable to get to the poll which is usually less than a mile from your house you should be an absentee ballot voter.

I think the best voting method is the optical system our precinct uses. You get a card with a broken arrow pointing right to the candidates name. You fill in the arrow with a number 2 pencil and the optical reader counts your vote when you insert the card into it. Not only does it make it really hard to vote for the wrong person, the machine will alert if a section is not filled out properly and the cards would definitely beat demples and chads in a recount.:glugglug

oh sure vote from home, what about the security.


do you know what it cost for the software for ATM's and how hard it is 2 write.

I have not checked in awhile, but the last time I did it wasn't for sale, the bank's lease it

Just think, what an ATM does

two phase commit is very very hard to do, and that's what they use or at least the last time I checked.

Won't work, we are talking about people that can't punch a hole with a pin.

:Graucho

Heh, but at least it spits it back out and beeps right then if it's not filled out properly. Then a poll worker can explain to them why they are an idiot:winkwink:

Oh yeah for sure, I'm just saying.. we're moving towards the electronic voting no matter whether we like it or no. So I'm just saying that when it comes time, they'll need to look at systems that are secure as it is, and one of those is ATM/money transactions.

I think one of the first card was the BankAmericard.. remember it had a catchy song that the Carpenters took and made into a hit? ("You've only just begun, to live")
Maybe misremembering..

Anywho, get out and vote! lol