Ga's top court upholds voting machine approval

[tosh]

Source: AP

ATLANTA (AP) - The Georgia Supreme Court has upheld a lower court decision affirming the state's right to use touch-screen voting machines.

A group of eight people had filed a suit claiming the machines violated their constitutional right to vote.

They argued there's no guarantee that electronic ballots are tallied correctly because there's no way to independently audit the votes collected by the machines.

In an opinion released Monday, the top court upheld a decision by the Fulton County Superior Court. The Supreme Court decision says the U.S. Constitution gives states the power to set the time, place and manner of holding elections. The court says the paperless system does not severely restrict the right to vote.



Read more: http://www.walb.com/global/story.asp?s=11210942

[Eric J in MN]

1. Just because the results of an election are whatever the company...

...which designed the machine wants, no one's hurt. Move along, nothing to see here.

(sarcasm)

[Hawkeye-X]

2. Those electronic crap is an actual violation of the HAVA law.

So the people needs to take it to the federal courts, not the state courts.

Hawkeye-X

[GreenTea]

5. HAVA is a pile of shit written by republicans to help republicans steal eclection...

The bullshit labeled "Help American Vote Act" (HAVA) was written in 2002 by the republicans, when the republicans controlled all three branches of government (and the US Supreme Court) and got this bias fucked up legislation passed easily as majority party in each House....It came about from peoples out cries when the US Supreme Court gave the election to George W Bush over the lies and cheating going on in Florida. Florida republicans, Governor Jeb Bush & Secretary of State (and Bush's FL State campaign president) Katerine Harris stole the state of Florida though voting machines (and "chads)for Republican Bush and the US Supreme court stopped the voting with Bush a few votes ahead before big democratic counties could be officially recounted and no doubt would of gone to VP Al Gore.

So the republican give it a bullshit name "HAVA" and the people pay no attention, again, the republicans just pushed this bullshit bill right on through through to serve their interest. Republicans wrote HAVA to ensure they could continue to be able cheat and steal elections through fixed electronic voting machines with no real accountability in close elections....in landslides it doesn't do them much good.

AND STILL THE COMPLACENT DEMOCRATS HAVE DONE NOTHING TO CHANGE HAVA OR ANY OTHER CHEATING VOTING ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES....

The stealing of an election is when the republicans can keep a race close and then the machines can do their jobs....Democrats think there will never be any close races again? That there will always be democratic landslide victories....Apparently so, because the democrats haven't done jack shit in the three years they've been the majority party in Congress....

It's pathetic and a problem just waiting to allow the republican back in and steal elections, they stole seats in places like GA, FL. AK even in 2008....The demo would have even a larger majority if HAVA and the machines were throw out.....But the fucking Dem's are complacent and don't see any problems....they never have...stupid fucks!

[Dr.Phool]

6. Actually, Chris Dodd wrote it. And still defends it.

Dumb as a box of rocks.

[GreenTea]

10. Then Republican Congressman Bob Ney, wrote the most sinister provisions of the HAVA

Get real dude - HAVA must be gotten rid of.

HAVA, for example, allows state voting officials to purge tens of thousands of voters from the polls using algorithms and voter ID requirements that disproportionately disenfranchise black, Hispanic and minority voters, and other Democratic demographics including senior citizens and young people.

Congressman Bob Ney (R-OH) his stewardship and authoring of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) back in 2001 and 2002. The heavy-handed tactics he has taken since then in order to keep the flawed act from being changed in any way over the years, along with the great lengths he's gone to in order to keep the nation's eyes off of massive electile dysfunction in Ohio and elsewhere since 2004 may finally soon get the attention it all properly deserves.

Ney's direct connection to the HAVA Election Reform bill passed in the wake of the 2000 Florida Election Debacle and his various extraordinary efforts to specifically block amendments to the bill and to smokescreen attempted investigations into his home state's conduct during the 2004 Election Debacle, has been less widely reported.

First, we assess the political forces and interest group differences that have prohibited Congress from building a consensus on VVPR legislation. Though most Democrats supported VVPR advocates and voting rights activists, Republicans, along with state and local government officials, voting machine manufacturers, and disability groups, questioned the feasibility of implementing a VVPR requirement in a timely, responsible, and effective way across fifty different state election systems. The objections of key stakeholders ultimately dissuaded Democratic leaders from pushing the legislation beyond a House subcommittee. Thus, state and local government organizations, which played a key role in the formation of HAVA, helped to block a move by Congress that would have taken a more coercive approach to implementing federal election standards. Second, using Krane's (2007Go) theory of state policy activism, we estimate a logistic regression model to explain why some states adopted the VVPR and others did not. We find that two components of Krane's theory—greater institutional capacity and activist group participation—help to explain why states adopted VVPR legislation. States with Democratic legislatures and moralistic political cultures were also more likely to enact the VVPR. Thus, election reform since HAVA has featured a continuation of state policy activism and has been shaped largely by political and interest group forces.

[santamargarita]

12. Well said, thanks

:bluebox:

[fascisthunter]

3. sick... totally anti-democratic

if there is no way of knowing how the votes are counted nor verification that ones vote is being counted, the election system is no longer democratic.

[EFerrari]

4. I'm sorry, Georgia.

:(

[bertman]

7. The Jawja Supreme Court is absolutely right. The paperless system DOES NOT restrict

the right to vote.

It restricts the right TO VOTE FOR THE CANDIDATE OF YOUR CHOICE.

And the NATIONAL Democratic leadership snores through this as if it matters not for democracy.

Recommend.

[zeemike]

11. What the court said was

That they have the right to vote but not a right to have the vote counted.
And I suppose they would argue that the constitution says nothing abut the right to have the vote counted....nust the right to vote.
That is how word games are played with issues like this.

[Zorra]

8. If Georgia Democrats ever want to elect Democrats to high level federal office,

they'll have to move to another state.

Georgia proved how corrupt it was when it used these machines to blatantly cheat Max Cleland out of his Senate seat.

As long as Georgia uses these machines, Georgia Democrats will be cheated.

[McCamy Taylor]

9. No, the law gives the FEDS the right to tell states like Georgia how to hold elections

because of their long and persistent history of denying voting rights to minorities. It has been on the books for a long time...since the mid 1960s.

They need to refile this in federal court.

[Bill Bored]

13. Did this lawyer make a good case or what?

If the lawyer made some dumb argument about recounts, that's not going to cut it. The argument is that software is unobservable and therefore, so is the count -- the FIRST ONE.

The questions for GA and the rest of us are: How competent was the counsel for the plaintiffs? What kind of case law does GA have with respect to vote counting? Any? Even for the votes of white folks? How much legal research was actually done to find out? What precedents were cited, etc?

It's certainly a bad decision, but one wonders how persuasive the plaintiffs were.