It’s Election Day, and residents here in Mercer County may have cast our last votes on the big old battleship-gray lever voting machines. Next election, we’re supposed to be using a new all-electronic system, without any of the necessary safeguards such as a voter-verifiable paper trail or public inspection of software code.
Election Day
November 4, 2003 by
Hi: Tell me, Tim, what is your point? You know perfectly well, that your system provides a paper trail that has nothing to do with the results produced by the voting system. What would be important, in your case, is to determine whether the bubble system treats the form you fill out as a source document, which is then subjected to public scrutiny for comparing to the electronic tally of the voting system. Some states permit as much as 1% of ballots to be reviewed. Is that a satisfactory statistically significant sampling?
I’ve said it before, in other discussions on the electronic voting methods, and here I will restate it.
I am in Tallahassee (yes, the infamous) – we have one of three nationally-certified elections supervisors in the state, and we have a very low error rate. We use an optical-sense system. You fill in bubbles with a black marker, when done slide it into a scanner. The scanner rejects anything with errors right then. What’s wrong with this system? It provides a paper trail, it’s efficient, it has a low error rate.. why is everyone so focused on touchscreens and electronic transmission when they have a proven non-mechanical system with low error rate?
Just a hunch – but could it be that the corporations pushing touchscreen voting are doing it because they already have big expertise in touchscreens (Diebold for example is a major supplier of touchscreen ATMs)?
It is a brave new world… and you don’t need to know about no stinking software code!
So, do you think that if our vote were rendered utterly inconsequential by the machinations of the Diebold Voting machine (“the machine that votes for you, so you don’t have to”™), would the unwashed masses even care or would they rejoice in their newly-found free time (naturally filled with must-see teevee)?