BBV: Fixing Democracy (NYT Lead Editorial)

[nostamj]

Fixing Democracy

<snip>
An accurate count of the votes cast is the sine qua non of a democracy, but one that continues to elude us. As now-discredited punch-card machines are being abandoned, there has been a shift to electronic voting machines with serious reliability problems of their own. Many critics, including computer scientists, have been sounding the alarm: through the efforts of a hacker on the outside or a malicious programmer on the inside, or through purely technical errors, these machines could misreport the votes cast.

They are right to be concerned. There is a fast-growing list of elections in which electronic machines have demonstrably failed, or produced dubious but uncheckable results. One of the most recent occurred, fittingly enough, in Palm Beach and Broward Counties in Florida just this month. Touch-screen machines reported 137 blank ballots in a special election for a state House seat where the margin of victory was 12 votes. The second-place finisher charged that faulty machines might have cost him the election. "People do not go to the polls in a one-issue election and not vote," he said. But since the machines produce no paper record, there was no way to check. It is little wonder that last month, Fortune magazine named paperless voting its "worst technology" of 2003.

<snip>

We no longer have poll taxes, but there are still significant obstacles to voting. In Florida in 2000, Katherine Harris, then the secretary of state, hired a private company to purge the voting rolls of felons, but ended up purging many nonfelons as well. There will be more voting roll purges this year, and little scrutiny is being given to how secretaries of state, many of whom are highly political, are conducting them. And the Help America Vote Act, passed after the 2000 debacle, includes new requirements for voter identification that could be used in some states to turn away voters.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/opinion/18SUN1.html

[gristy]

1. Great editorial. Was posted last night, but those threads have dropped.

go here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=1029378

[RedEagle]

2. Keep it kicked for Monday

Kick!

[Timefortruth]

3. kick

and drip, drip, drip....

[Andy_Stephenson]

5. Well we have one here in Washington...

When asked three times in the League of women voters. Why his office had certified software, that was not legally able to be certified.

Mr Reed Stated to the moderator: "Joycelyn, do we have to put up with this"?

Mr Reed...The question is Do WE have to put up with you?

[Terwilliger]

4. Good to see something about it

it isn't a major topic of conversation in national circles