If Anyone Needs EVIDENCE That Elec Systems Should Provide Paper Trails-Go To Sarasota-E.J. Dionne

[kpete]

An Electronic Canary

And if anyone still needs evidence that all electronic systems should provide verifiable paper trails so real ballots are available in the event of a recount, let them go to Sarasota.

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, November 24, 2006; Page A41

Supporters of new voting technologies have been patting themselves on the back, saying there were no big voting problems this year. Let them go to Sarasota.

Here's the story so far: The official vote count in the battle for -- you won't believe this -- Katherine Harris's seat put Republican Vern Buchanan 369 votes ahead of Democrat Christine Jennings out of roughly 238,000 votes cast.

.............

If the courts punt, Congress, which has a right to judge the credentials of its members, should get to the bottom of this. It may be asking the impossible, but Democrats and Republicans should not make this a fight about which party picks up one more seat. Instead, they should conduct a joint inquest into this contest to provide a basis for bipartisan legislation creating national standards for improving our voting systems.

The U.S. Supreme Court has insisted that "aving once granted the right to vote on equal terms, the State may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person's vote over that of another." Thousands of voters in the 13th District have an interest in demanding that the system live up to those words, which came from the decision in a little case in 2000 called Bush v. Gore.


much more at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/23/AR2006112300965.html

[DoYouEverWonder]

1. The hell with a paper trail

throw the damn machines out.

Go back to pen and paper and allow each batch ballot to be counted through two different optical scanners. If the totals match, the numbers are good.

[acmejack]

2. I prefer the space shuttle methodology

Two out of three, run them through three machines and if two match run with them.

[bonito]

3. This smells to bad to ignore

I hope the heat stays on.
Since Election Day, dozens -- if not hundreds -- of voters have reported problems at the polls. Some say their vote for Jennings never registered after they touched her name. Others say they never saw the congressional race on the machine's screen.


The results showed that the undervoted ballots skewed Democratic in all of those races, even in the three races in which the county as a whole went Republican.

In the governor's race, for example, Republican Charlie Crist won handily in Sarasota, easily beating Democrat Jim Davis. But on the undervoted ballots, Davis finished ahead by almost 7 percentage points.

In the agriculture commissioner's race, Republican Charles Bronson beat Copeland by a double-digit margin among all voters. But on the undervoted ballots, Copeland won by about 3 percentage points.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/state/orl-mvote2206nov22,0,1913349.story?coll=orl-news-headlines-state

[Peace Patriot]

4. Too late! Get these fascist corporations OUT OF OUR ELECTION SYSTEN NOW!

And they are....

DIEBOLD: Until recently, headed by CEO Wally O'Dell, a Bush-Cheney campaign chair and major fundraiser (a Bush "Pioneer" right up there with Ken Lay), who promised in writing to "deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush-Cheney in 2004"; and

ES&S: The election theft corporation in question in FL-13, a spinoff of Diebold (similar computer architecture), initially funded by rightwing billionaire Howard Ahmanson, who also gave one million dollars to the extremist 'christian' Chalcedon Foundation (which touts the death penalty for homosexuals, among other things).

These are the people who now "count" more than 80% of the nations' voters using TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code--thanks to those golden public servants Tom Delay and Bob Ney (and their 'Democratic' buds like Christopher Dodd). They've stolen one presidential election. No doubt that was the main purpose of fast-tracking these extremely insecure and insider hackable voting machines and central tabulators all over the country, between 2002 and 2004, with $3.9 billion in boondoggle funding--to shove Bush's unjust, illegal, heinous war on Iraq down our throats. They've stolen OTHER elections (notably the Senate election in GA in '02, and who knows how many more?), as well as denying the Democrats a landslide in '06. They've corrupted our election officials and legislators from one end of the country to the other, with lavish lobbying and a culture of secrecy direct from corporate board rooms. They've repeatedly lied about the security and reliability of their machines, and intensely lobbied for no paper trail, no audit, secret industry "testing" of the machines, and laws prohibiting the public and its election officials from reviewing their TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY vote "tabulation" code.

And we're going to REWARD these bad actors with MORE multi-billions in contracts, now for printers?

Are we nuts?

[Igel]

5. It should be investigated.

The most likely explanation I've seen to date, however, is the flip side of the butterfly-ballot disaster from 2000. Purely the kind of thing that webpage designers and other designers of graphic interfaces know to take into account: Put nothing important where people are likely to overlook it.