Are touchscreens going to give US the win?

[Must_B_Free]

Better yet - what if a repug trixter jacks the vote in the Dems favor to make it look like the Dems cheated... and if we win, won't they just say that happened, anyway?

Whoever wins the CA recall, the results will be suspect.

When you have a system that is not secure - anything can happen.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2003/10/03/state0351EDT0011.DTL&type=printable

[lcordero]

1. What's going to have to happen is that every person that

voted is going to have to stand outside the polling place in order to get the results. If every single person that voted isn't there then they will get away with it.
BTW...I think that the machines are there so that the Dems could never get a filibuster-proof majority. It's not like the Dems are ever going to get a filibuster-proof majority anyways. There are something like 300+ Republicans in the House and almost 80-something Republicans in the Senate.

http://clerkweb.house.gov/cgi-bin/vote.exe?year=2002&rollnumber=455
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=107&session=2&vote=00237

[Brian Sweat]

2. If touchscreen voting works the way it is supposed to

it would detroy the Republican party. In 2000 there were nearly 180,000 undervoted or overvoted presidential ballots. The vast majority of these were in heavily Democratic precincts. Some of these undervotes were just people that didn't want to vote, but most were spoiled ballots. Eliminating all of these spoiled ballot would tip the ballance heavily to the Democrats in Florida. Touchscreen voting should eliminate spoiled ballots if it works properly.

The Republican party knows that spoiled ballots give them a huge advantage. Anything that significantly reduces spoiled ballots, has to scare the shit out of them and give them added incentive to rig the vote.

I generally ecshew conspiracy theories, but when you look at the numbers it becomes obvious that the Republicans will have to cheat in 2004 or they will get clobbered. If all of the spoiled ballots in 2000 had been registered correctly, Al Gore probably would have won Florida by over 50,000 votes and the national popular vote by several million.

[lcordero]

3. disenfranchisement

http://www.democracysouth.org/improving/rights-disenfranchisement.html

Bush came out 80,000 votes ahead in TN
135,000 votes ahead in LA

There were some irregularities in TN and LA
I think that Gore would have won Florida by over 150,000 rather than 50,000.

[Timefortruth]

4. Yes IF they did.

But since the Republicans are pushing them who will likely benefit?

[Beetwasher]

5. Mutually Assured Destruction

I've been giving some thought to this as the "nuclear" solution to the e-voting problem. What if, through backchannels, it was made known that if the Repubs try rigging the vote, certain other parties would totally trash the system rendering the election useless, null and void and exposing the EVM's as completely unreliable once and for all...