Comments (7)

jimbo92107 wrote on January 4, 2007 3:58 PM:

My guess is that Sandy Buchanan lied about having difficulties voting, because it was Democrats whose votes were being blocked. By claiming that her vote for a Republican candidate was impeded, she was attempting to deflect accusations that the problems were targeting Democratic voters.

Nice try, Sandy. A loyal wife will lie for her husband.

David in Burbank wrote on January 5, 2007 10:06 AM:

I doubt it's a lie. It hurts the implied cause more than it helps, as it might start worring republican voters eleswhere that the machines are in fact bad machines, rather than just riggered against dumb ass democrats.

Charles wrote on January 5, 2007 11:09 AM:

Why are people so inclined to believe the machines were "rigged"? We've all heard the phrase "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." While I'm not a fan of certain public officials, I would struggle to believe they'd go so far as to rig a race like FL-13 by hacking the machines. If that race was to mean anything, a LOT more races would have to be rigged.

Touch screens suck, they're difficult to calibrate, and don't work well when the screens get dirty (like when 1000 people have touched it). Technology is damn good at certain things, but paper still rules in a lot of cases.

There's a lot of issues here, that the machines can be (not necessarily have been) made to lie about the results is only one of them. This result is simply more evidence for the need of paper receipts. That would both lessen any confusion by the voter and make the malice harder.

Christopher wrote on January 5, 2007 3:11 PM:

Paper receipts are probably not the answer: paper can jam, printers run out of ink, etc. The simplest answer is still a paper ballot that people make marks on. It can be recounted later, and can't be electronically altered.

DallasNE wrote on January 5, 2007 3:59 PM:

I am with Christopher. The electronic system has often been compared to ATM machines but there are key differences. ATM machines are not touch screen. Instead you use a combination of keypad and keys to the side of the screen. The ATM also prints out a receipt so you can verify your transaction. The amount of printing on the receipt is tiny compared to printing a paper ballot so the chances of jamming, running out of ink, etc. are far greater with printing paper ballots. Two changes could fix most problems with electronic ballots. One, use light pens rather than touch screen to resolve the dirty screen problem. A successful touch with the light pen would cause the background color for the candidate to bold. Two, make casting the ballot a two step process. After completing your ballot there would be a "finish" button you hit. What that would do is write your data to a log record that would then display back on the screen how you marked your ballot. At this point you would be asked to either "remark" or "cast" your ballot. Casting would make the record permanent on the log file and the log file would be used for the internal tally.

As you can see, that would be somewhat intimidating to quite a few voters. Accordingly, a paper ballot that can be read electronically is the best route to go, as suggested by Christopher.

JIMMMY wrote on January 5, 2007 9:53 PM:

HI
Thanks for the blog, getting more accurate vote counts
seems to be the right thing to do, President Bush was correct in one of his African speeches when he said the only acceptable form of government is democracy. He also defined democracy, in that speech, as one vote one-person majority government. This requires every vote be counted and every vote be counted correctly and verifiable when results are questioned. In the Republic of Ireland, they seem to have a very reliable paper ballot system without using machines. They do not use the e-voting machines they bought a few years ago and have in storage. The same kind that were shown to be unreliable in Holland’s elections where the wrong results were given by the machines.

It takes more time to count in Ireland because each ballot box is opened and votes counted in front of both partisan and neutral vote observers using hand counting.
It, also, takes additional time because they count twice. They start with an overall total count with out regard to whom the votes are for because of proportional representation. This lets them know how many votes are needed to win a particular race. By this method, votes for a person are counted until he has enough votes to get a seat.

If 5 seats are being contested as soon as one candidate gets twenty percent he is elected and the ballots of other people who chose him continued to be counted using their second choice as their first choice. Everyone’s vote is counted. This way more peoples votes count in making up the legislature. If you voted for a person who already has enough votes to be elected WHEN your vote is counted then your second choice is counted as your vote in that particular race.
They do this to overcome a legislative districting map that, like in Pennsylvania, packs many voters of one party into one district where the majority wins the seat by a wide margin, but allows minority parties to win other districts by small majorities. Minorities in these cases can win majorities in the administration and legislatures, and control of public laws and policies goes to minorities. This type system is defiantly not one -vote one-person democracy government, because a minority of voters can control the legislature and policy. The extra cost in time in getting the results in one-person one vote democratic majority governments is a requirement for democracy to result from election procedures. Optical scan paper trail voting could speed up the counting if necessary, but it should be a copy of the entire ballot, not some abbreviated version.

Beverly L. Darwin wrote on January 6, 2007 7:11 PM:

We need paper ballots WE can pen in. These voting machines have too many secretive problems, including their initial inspections by such companies as decertified Ciber, and inaccessibility to recover votes or vote counts.