Richard WarnickRich’s Pick: NYT Takes On the E-Voting Fiasco
In a thoroughly-researched lead article in tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine, Clive Thompson asks the most important questions about 2008:
What happens if the next presidential election is extremely close and decided by a handful of votes cast on machines that crashed? Will voters accept a presidency decided by ballots that weren’t backed up on paper and existed only on a computer drive? And what if they don’t?
…One might expect computer scientists to be fans of computer-based vote-counting devices, but it turns out that the more you know about computers, the more likely you are to be terrified that they’re running elections.
January 5th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
I wrote the voting system for student officers at the university that I work for, because that’s what they wanted, and that’s my job. It is very clear to me that such an electronic voting system is far more prone to hijack and fraud that ANY OTHER method, and such kind of fraud is the most difficult to detect.
In this day and age of willy-nilly excluding candidates of both major parties from presidential debates, I am in great fear that the establishment-annointed candidate(s) will “win” their “elections,” and none of us will know that a fraud has been perpetrated on us.
I am in favor paper balloting, where the voter receives a copy of the ballot that he or she cast, so that the possibility of fraud is virtually eliminated.
January 6th, 2008 at 1:06 am
The glaring omission in this article is that nothing is mentioned concerning the elections the REPUBLICANS have already stolen using these horrible machines. There have been elections where supposedly nobody voted for a candidate, including the candidate himself. There have been numerous instances where many more people voted then were registered, (sometimes numbering in the thousands.) Many, many people have reported, under oath, that when they pushed the button for their guy, the other button, (usually BUSH or a republican), lit up, (NEVER Kerry or a democrat.)
This stuff is deadly serious and my tin foil hat is telling me that now that it’s obvious from the Iowa primaries that democrats are showing up in unbelievable numbers, we’re finally going to be worrying about computer hacking.
Lets hand mark and hand count the ballots. It will force somebody to physically enter a building and stuff the ballot box as opposed to numerous, invisible and undetectable ways to hack the vote. It’s our only chance for any kind of transparency in 2008!
January 6th, 2008 at 1:43 am
If anyone can be said to have started the voting integrity movement first, it has to be Beverly Harris who has been featured in two excellent documentaries. The first one is called “Hacking Democracy” and was broadcast on HBO last year. It was nominated for an emmy award. HBO would never have shown the documentary if it had the slightest hint of bad journalism.
The other documentary which has been released very recently features, for the first time, Bruce Funk from Emery county Utah, who exposed Utah’s voting system to experts form Beverly Harris’s organization and finally forced the main stream print media to take the issue seriously. The name of this documentary is “Uncounted.” If you care about free and fair elections in America, you must see these two films!
Here is Beverly Harris’s take on the New York Times article mentioned in this post.