NYT Editorial: "A Quick Fix for Electronic Voting "

[electropop]

When Americans go to the polls in November, many will likely have to cast their ballots on unreliable paperless electronic voting machines. If the election is close, the country could end up with a rerun of 2000’s bitterly contentious and mistrusted count. In an effort to avoid another such disaster, Representative Rush Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, plans to introduce a bill this week that would help address the weaknesses in electronic voting. Congress should pass it without delay.

The flaws of electronic voting machines have been thoroughly documented by academic studies and by voters’ experiences. The machines are far too vulnerable to hacking that could change the outcomes of elections. They are also so prone to mechanical error and breakdown that there is no way to be sure that the totals they report are correct. In some cases, these machines have been known to “flip” votes — award votes cast for one candidate to an opponent.

The solution is for all votes to be recorded on paper records. Voters can then verify that their choice has been accurately reflected — and the paper record can be used as a backup for the electronic machines. Whenever votes are tallied on electronic machines, there should be an audit of paper records as a check on the electronic results. If the paper totals do not match the electronic tallies, something has clearly gone wrong — and the tally of the paper ballots can be treated as the official one.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/16/opinion/16wed1.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin

[aquart]

1. Better quick fix. Junk them all.

Dig holes. Dump them in. Pour cement.

[ursi]

8. damn, I wish we could get our tax dollars back too! What a waste!

[DJ13]

2. The quickest fix is cheap

[electropop]

3. More accurate, faster and cheaper.

That's why the GOP doesn't want it!

[johan helge]

4. Only in America

can you have unverifiable votes - and still be taken seriously. As a Norwegian, I wonder why the Democrats don't SCREAM about this.

[Demeter]

5. We ARE Screaming--But NObody Listens

Crank up the "Sounds of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkle.

[tom_paine]

6. As a member of the Free World with a relatively Free Press, you cannot imagine

to what ends the sophisticated and interconnected sciences of advertising, psychology, public relations, and marketing can do to create a False Reality that is unpiercable.

Pray to God you never understand what I am talking about.

The False Reality Bubble helps to keep the Imperial Subjects of Amerika from seeing what it real, but it also keeps us from seeing each other, from hearing each other' screams, as it were.

If you haven't noticed in Free Norway... America, Russia, and China are basically ruled by the same form of government and each are endemic surveillance states.

We Americans get treated more "nicely" than our Russian and Chinese counterparts, but only because our totalitarian rulers have to play pretend until the last generations of us who remember freedom... grow old and die.

When that happens, America will become much more like Russia and China.

We are screaming, you just can't hear us from behind the Televised Iron Curtain.

Be careful and try not to have too much contempt for those of who have lost our freedom and our votes. You currently have that luxury in Free Norway.

However, twenty years ago I felt those same feelings of superiority for the enslaved Russians. Now I AM an enslaved Russian. It could happen in Norway, too, as freedom is in retreat and rout all over the world these days.

Or maybe it just feels like it because I am living behind the Televised Iron Curtain of lies that is modern Amerika.

[johan helge]

7. From the editorial: The Holt bill

"is opt-in — it does not force any jurisdiction to make changes". Why this absurd timidity? There's a lot of wrong in Norway. But no Norwegian advocating unverifiable elections would ever be taken quite seriously ever again.

[tom_paine]

9. But that is the genius of totalitarianism. It morphs into new shapes, whatever shape it needs to be

based on the nation and time period it is trying to be reborn into.

What blinds so many, here in the Empire, is that so many of us are conditioned to see totalitarianism only in a brutal, mostly-straightforward (to our eyes, anyway) Nazi/Soviet way. Because that is what we were taught as children.

If your Norwegian Bushies (and you have them, rest assured, they are a component of every society, and are always waiting for the moment to seize power) assault Norway, which they may be doing already, I have no way of knowing, it will be done in ways that your people do not recognize.

I must also add here that the first assaults on American Democracy, the Constitution and System of Checks and Balances, carried out during the 80s, did not appear to be particularly troubling at the time.

Media consolidation arising from the removal of FCC regulations, created shortly after WWII when they saw what Gleichschaltung had done to Germany and Russia's media, did not seem particularly dangerous at first.

Nor did the end of the Fairness Doctrine, because we couldn't imagine what the Bushies were plotting for the future, a uniform and totalitarian message-media, created from one-part Party Media, and two-parts lazy consolidated downsized frightened media bullied by their corporate masters into following the Bush Party Line.

In fact, they hired sophists to explain it all away. "Don't worry about losing the Fairness Doctrine. 500 channel cable will provide choice." It sounded reasonable to 1980s American who could have never imagined 24/7 Cable TV Infoganda where one channel is exactly like another and the American Attention Span has been reduced to 24/7 coverage of a single story at a time.

But at the time, we couldn't imagine those things.

Maybe it won't happen to you. Maybe your country will hold out against the rising tide of global totalitarianism masquerading itself with the rotting corpse of democracies lost, as in Amerika.

But you must watch out for the first chippings away at the foundations of your freedom, and remember that they will be camouflaged to appear innocuous, and will have hired sophists there to tell you why it's all right, don't worry, it isn't what it looks like...

For all you know, it could be happening now. But there is one thing I can assure you,if you do not resist it when it is embryonic, and turn it back while it is still weakened enough to turn back, then you risk the fate of Amerika, which is to embrace a kind of National Insanity, a False Reality, as lunatic as anything Orwell ever wrote.

And it will be tailor-made to put you at ease while it slips it's chains around you. To you, the Amerikan form of the New Totalitarianism sticks out like a sore thumb, but your "Norwegian Bushies" are preparing something for YOU that isn't so easy for Norwegians to notice.

As Thomas Jefferson once said, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."

And remember, being sure that "It Can't Happen Here" is halfway already to It Happening.

http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/jaspers02.htm

[Jemmons]

10. You are absolutely right

If your Norwegian Bushies (and you have them, rest assured, they are a component of every society, and are always waiting for the moment to seize power) assault Norway, which they may be doing already, I have no way of knowing, it will be done in ways that your people do not recognize.

We have a more stable base for democracy here in the nordic countries but its happening anyway. Here in Denmark we have had a slow errosion of investigative journalism and a government supported campaign against unbiased media. We have increased survailance in terms of internet activity, body search zones, and camera survalance in streets. Its all hapening very slowly and sold with clever use of largely irrelevant but highly sensational cases of terror-planning. Hopefully the US is going to be less of a shining example to the supporters of this before long.

[bklyncowgirl]

11. Democrats aren't screaming because they like the idea of easily hackable votes just fine

Not all Democrats, of course, but enough to keep anything from being done to fix the problem. Rush Holt has been floating various versions of this bill for years and it goes nowhere. That's in part because of flaws in the bill that have lead some activists to oppose it, but also because there are entrenched interests that have simply refused to budge.

The whole system is rigged to keep the "right" people in power.

Jerrymandering is a bipartisan affair--although the Republicans have pursued it far more systematically and ruthlessly than the Democrats have. I'm afraid that there's a segment of the Democratic leadership who are perfectly OK with the idea of hackable voting machines--as long as they get to control them--of course the Republicans have outmaneuvered them on this too--the companies that own the voting machines are linked to the Republican party.

I'd hoped that electing Howard Dean as DNC Chairman might help swing the party to see this as a threat but so far he has not been able to make much if any headway. Much of the Congressional leadership is more interested in keeping their seats and if Congressman Blowhard is in a solid Democratic district he may well see these machines as a friend who can help him fight off primary challangers than an enemy.

Just my cynical, cranky take on the issue.

[Highway61]

12. No one is asking

Just how much $$$$ these bastards got paid for installing all those machines under our noses.... OUR tax dollars at work!