With new voting machines coming online in more and more states, questions arise about how these machines work and if our votes are safe.
While slightly alarmist in nature, Ronnie Dugger’s article, How They Could Steal the Election This Time, does raise some very good points about the technology behind the machines, and questions why not even basic error checking was included.
But articles such as this miss the BIG question: Did Florida 2000 ruin our belief in the validity of our voting system?
I don’t know that it ruined it, but that it opened our eyes to the sham our voting system is. Anything that involves the Electoral College is nothing but a joke in my eyes.
Mark, I think when the system clearly reveals a country divided almost straight down the middle, it works extremely well. Fact is, there was no real choice for President in 2000 and the ensuing months uncovered a bigger problem: These two parties are diametrically opposite to the point of bitter hatred and intolerance. We’re teetering with civil war and unless we resolve to drop the party hats, we’re going to find ourselves blatantly governed by special interest groups.
Our election data showed this in 2000 and my guess is it will be a squeaker in ‘04. When we talk of election reform, our minds don’t often expand beyond campaign financing and dangling chads.
I think it’s time to redefine the old party stereotypes and redefine them.
In my entire lifetime, I will ALWAYS associate “Democrat” with homosexual-friendly, abortionist femi-nazi, and sex scandals.
And Republicans will forever be bible thumping capital punishment back-scratching election-stealers.
I didn’t create these stereotypes. The parties did. We better redefine them before brother kills brother.
Charles, nice points and I agre with them. But the article isn’t spotlighting the manner in which the US voter is decided.
The article is spotlighting the fact that these new electronic touch screen voting machines do not record votes correctly.
Sequoia Voting Systems demonstrated its voting technology in California last week. They uncovered a glitch during the test. A voter could pick between an English or Spanish option. When a voter choose Spanish, the machine then failed to record the vote, EVEN THOUGH the printed receipt seemed to print out the voters peference.
If that were a real election, and even if it was a true mistake in programming, and the election was decided by only 10,000 votes (or 537), how long would it take before Latino activist groups were up-in-arms saying their votes were not recorded? The largest growing minority population in the US had its votes tossed away.
Like I say, if that were a real election, we’d have Florida 2000 all over again. An this time it would not be around the technology free “hanging” chads, but the super-technology of voting machines.
That brings up questions on many fronts. One, why the hell wasn’t the Spanish language menu’s tested before the demonstration in front of California’s voting commision, whose state has a very large Latino population?
Next, when millions of people have died for this simple right, why are people taking this so lightly? To take this issue so lightly is to laugh in the face of any person that wore the uniform, all the activists at civil demonstrations that put their foot down to make sure their group was heard.
That is why many activists are demanding paper trails (There were not required until recently, and many of these voting machines were designed and built with no printer port!), and that the source code be open source and freely available on the internet. That way there is the ultimate transparency of the process.