Faith Based
Voting
-Joseph Stalin
We want fair elections with votes counted in "public," not on a hard drive in cyberspace by a privately owned corporation. In fact, we demand it. And so does, emphatically, our Constitution. We cannot trust any election or dubiously elected official to conduct the people's business until this matter is resolved.
-Duane Evans, Greenville News, 2/6/08
Who did I vote for in the last election? Good question. There's more evidence of the last hamburger I ate than the last vote I cast. Even McDonald's gives you a receipt, but when it comes to the one way we have to control the government, we simply have to trust them.
This issue transcends all the others. There's no point in persuading voters, no point in putting out yard signs, no point in mailings or phone banks or bumper stickers if an election is simply going to be decided by a line of code.
I used to do software validation for the space shuttle program. We never took anything for granted, even though nobody with access to the code had any reason to hack it. To me at least, it beggars belief that we're all supposed to just trust machines that were bought by political appointees and which will determine who is and who isn't going to hold political power. That this is in fact the case seems by itself to warrant concern.
A verifiable paper trail would of course solve the problem and be fairly easy to implement. That this wasn't done in the first place may speak volumes. There seems to be a consensus building toward verifiable voting, but if elections are in fact being corrupted then electoral pressure is obviously a problematic remedy.
addendum:
(12/7/06) OK, according to Wikipedia, here's how Venezuala does it-
Even though a fair number of international observers were present, the CNE instituted an open and public series of audits of the vote results. Each one of the 11,118 automated polling places was equipped with multiple high-tech touch-screen DRE voting machines, one to a "mesa electoral", or voting "table". In total, 32,331 voting machines were in use country-wide. After the vote is cast, each machine prints out a paper ballot, or VVPAT, which is inspected by the voter and deposited in a ballot box belonging to the machine's table. The voting machines perform in a stand-alone fashion, disconnected from any network until the polls close.
So, yeah .... Venezuala has it figured out.
We don't.
They do.
Venezuala.
Where Hugo Chavez is president.
addendum2:
(3/31/08) You should see the paper trail for a declared and filed federal candidate.
At the bottom line where the voting rubber actually hits the electoral road, not so much.
(12/7/06) OK, according to Wikipedia, here's how Venezuala does it-
Even though a fair number of international observers were present, the CNE instituted an open and public series of audits of the vote results. Each one of the 11,118 automated polling places was equipped with multiple high-tech touch-screen DRE voting machines, one to a "mesa electoral", or voting "table". In total, 32,331 voting machines were in use country-wide. After the vote is cast, each machine prints out a paper ballot, or VVPAT, which is inspected by the voter and deposited in a ballot box belonging to the machine's table. The voting machines perform in a stand-alone fashion, disconnected from any network until the polls close.
So, yeah .... Venezuala has it figured out.
We don't.
They do.
Venezuala.
Where Hugo Chavez is president.
addendum2:
(3/31/08) You should see the paper trail for a declared and filed federal candidate.
At the bottom line where the voting rubber actually hits the electoral road, not so much.
