Letters to the Editor
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Just Give Up! Democracy is a fraud, Everyone is corrupt and Hope is Dead...
and nothing you can do will change that... My tongue is firmly in cheek but my outrage at some of the responses to this article is not in check.
Do your best to kill democracy with nihilistic, defeatist, hyper-depressed cynicism if that gives you your jollies. But I intend to try to keep Democracy alive by voting, actively pushing us back to a course of accountability. Democracy sucks but every other form of government or chaos is worse.
The core of all consensus realities as Democracy is - is the people who keep working to maintain that reality. Go hide under your bed or in your fallout shelter or keep your head up and try to maintain standards. Your choice of course as always....amazing thing that.
The article is about the last election - and I am not denying their were and probably are problems still. But, in fact the paper tape that goes inside the sealed cassette is a back-up and if needed we can and will demand it be checked. Right!? This is potentially much more accurate than paper counting. How many of you have ever held a job where you had to match 1k plus envelopes with 1k plus letters and make them come out square? How many of you have found extras of either at the end. Counting by humans is rarely accurate. Counting by machines is closer. Yes their are some problems that must be solved as with any event/change/factor/situation that we all encounter daily.
The system where people counted paper ballots was no more or less prone to problems than the machines. In the end the machine is just a tool like a pencil or a shovel... the people who work them are the key to whether the machines or the pencil or the shovel work. Someone counting pencil marks is just as likely to fraud/exhaustion/crossed eyes as a machine might be to tampering... We can/should/will be making sure that the machine is doing its job. To do that we need to be paying attention not hiding and complaining that it is all pointless!
I for one will keep on shovelling...
Di
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Investigating Linda Lamone, the Elections Director in Georgia
I think someone needs to investigate Linda Lamone, the "Democratic" Elections Director in Georgia--to see what her ties are to the Right- Wingers. I remember that when the famous "butterfly ballot" (in the Florida 2000 election) lost so many votes for Al Gore, everyone excused its creator, Theresa Lapore, because she was a "Democrat". It seems to me that a real question about Theresa's loyalty to the Democrats was revealed--after that election was over!.
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Oh Canada
Thanks to those who've been praising our paper system! Although, in fairness, I am a dual citizen and vote absentee in New Jersey, and I've never had a problem with my absentee ballot (that I know of).
I think the other key to trust in elections in Canada is that our federal elections are overseen by Elections Canada which is an entirely *non-partisan* agency. From Wikipedia (good quote): Election officers must be politically neutral: they may not favour one political party or candidate over any other. Special precautions ensure that no political leanings can affect the administration of electoral events. All election workers must take an oath to uphold voters’ rights and the secrecy of the vote, and to perform their duties without favouritism.
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Re: How they work
I manage a precinct too. We have a different touch screen system (not Diebold), but it has some similarities. Not having seen the Diebold system, I can't say for sure, but it seems like our system is better designed, but these are still complicated computers that can run complicated code and one must trust the election board. Of course the same was true of the old pin and lever machines and is true of most systems.
Let me address some of your points.
0) I don't think letting campaign workers have the machines at their own house for weeks is a good idea. Of course mine spend a few days in a public library sealed up (like yours), but you can never guarantee that a person with enough resources can't fool with them.
1) This is a problem with any election system. You could take paper ballots, fill them out, and deposit them in a paper ballot box. Or any other way a ballot is cast, you could cast extra ballots if you had the support of your co-workers. If you were really motivated, you could figure out who was not likely to vote (public record) or wait until the end of the day, then forge voters signatures, and cast ballots. That's why (presumably) the campaign workers are at least nominally of different parties. So they won't collude to do this.
So in this case I presume they would count ALL the votes. If the outcome was in doubt, the courts might declare a new election. In any case, they would know who to arrest.
3) If yours are like ours, they have a battery backup. They might even beep at you if you pull out the power. In any case, the votes will be stored to non-volatile RAM and won't be lost if the power goes out.
I think one of the biggest oversights with the Diebold machines is that it sounds like they use a readily available smart card, like something you open a hotel door with. But since I haven't seen one, I could be wrong. In our system, it is a proprietary cartridge that has no electrical contact with the machine. And we never give anything to the voter. We stick the cartridge in the machine and then select the ballot for them (Dem. primary, Rep. Primary, if there are two different ballots in the precinct, etc.) This doesn't make it impossible to hack, but more difficult.
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Also
'All politics is local'. There you have it. Republicans know it. They knew it when they crowded a Pennsylvania school board with religious nutjobs who beleive that the world is only 6000 years old, who beleive that our children should be taught this. And then they made it law. The Republicans knew it when they organized to fill as many lower-level positions in local and regional government, especially ones which are functional and controlling in the democratic process. They knew that politics is local when they put Ken Blackwell and Kat Harris and many others in the generally ignored position of Secretary of State. They knew it when they went further down to the neighborhood level, swarming polling stations and election official positions with hardcore Republicans.
If you want fair elections you have to fight for them. Not just every 2 years, but every day. Some of these positions of influence are small and require only a small fraction of your time, but as aggregates- as democratic institutions- they wield all the power in the world.