Here in Georgia, the voting was completely automated. I'll admit I felt a little uneasy with no visible ballot. The touch screen voting machines installed over the last two years lack the advantage of transparency. How do I know that in the thousands of lines of programming code someone didn't slip in a line of code that subtly skews the results? I don't mean to sound paranoid and I'm not a Ludite. But even though computers have lots of advantages, their functioning is not transparent to the ordinary citizen.
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:brin-l-bounces@;mccmedia.com] On Behalf Of Julia Thompson Sent: Tuesday, November 05, 2002 7:08 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: In Praise of Paper Ballots "J. van Baardwijk" wrote: > > At 10:16 05-11-2002 -0800, John Giorgis wrote: > > >http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/techwrapper.jsp?PID=1051-250&CID =1051-110502A > > A few comments. > > First, paper ballots are not as resistant to fraud and error as the author > wants his audience to believe. People involved in counting the votes will > have vast numbers of ballots going through their hands; it is easy count a > vote as one for candidate A, while the vote was actually for candidate B > (either intentionally (fraud) or unintentionally (human error, caused by > the monotonous nature of the job)). Well, I used a paper ballot. I put marks in ovals with a #2 pencil. The ballots will not be hand-counted; they will be going through a machine that reads forms marked with #2 pencils. You don't do a hand count unless someone complains and asks for a recount. > Second, the process of counting all those votes can take several days, > which makes it look rather outdated in this era of "I need the results > yesterday". Not if they're going through a computerized reader at a rate of at least one per second (I don't know how long it takes to actually scan them in, but based on similar forms I've had experience with, 60 a minute would be an absolute *minimum*.) > Third, there is the environmental issue: printing all those forms for all > those millions of voters is going to cost you a lot of trees. Can't argue with you there. Maybe it's possible, though, once the election is truly *over* to recycle them, in which case it won't be totally wasted. It also may be possible that the paper the ballots are printed on is recycled already. > Fourth, all those piles of papers have to be stored somewhere. The ballots > from just one election take up quite a lot of valuable storage space. Once the results are in and there's no challenge that they'd need the paper ballots for, they can be disposed of. > The alternative: electronic voting. And with that I do not mean the voting > machines that are currently in use in the US, I mean real electronic > voting, which does not require any pieces of paper to be marked or punched. > And rather than needing entire warehouses to store all the ballots from all > those elections, all you need is a harddisk and a backup tape. > > Impossible? No - we have been doing it that way for over a decade here in > The Netherlands. All you need to do is look at the board, find the name of > the candidate you wish to vote for, press the button beside the candidate's > name, press "Confirm", and you are done. When the polling station closes, > the final results are sent on to another computer which processes the > totals of all the polling stations. It is simple, it is safe, and it is > fast: the final nationwide results are known within a few hours after the > polling stations close. > > So, why is it that such a technologically advanced nation as the US is > still using outdated technology, while some European country has been using > a high-tech solution for over a decade already? Um, because the bugs aren't all worked out yet? I heard rumors of problems with the early voting in Dallas on a fully electronic system, where for some reason, everything was being recorded as straight-ticket Republican. Given that, I don't want to trust *my* vote to a fully electronic system until issues like that have been unheard of for a few election cycles. (I don't trust the programmers not to stick in something that they could be bribed to fix. I might trust specific programmers once I got to know them, but I figure there will be a couple of bad apples in the bunch and so I don't trust *all* of them as a *class*.) I'm happiest with the system under which I voted -- paper ballot that you mark to be scanned electronically and votes tallied electronically. Not paper ballot to be tallied by human, not paper ballot to have holes punched out, but paper ballot to be marked by writing instrument and scanned by machine. (And in the case of demanding a recount, you *can* have people eyeballing all the ballots; and the returns from a recount aren't under quite the same time pressure as results on election night.) Julia just my $0.02, and happy my ballot was the type I like best _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
