i filled in the bubbles, how about you, bubble, touch screen, punch card?

[AlCzervik]

do they still use punch cards?

[bicentennial_baby]

1. We connect both ends of the arrow, OptiScan

:hi:

[AlCzervik]

4. awesome! My sister just called, "I'm soooo excited!" i shamed her into voting

in a primary, her first evah! "Do you love my nieces, do you love your niece....get your ass to the voting booth!"

[bicentennial_baby]

7. I just voted a few minutes ago...

And spent most of my day at school gettin' out da vote. Walking up to complete strangers, telling them when the polls close, the website to find their polling location. :)

[DJ13]

2. We fill in a line between the front half and back half of an arrow

Optical here in Central California too.

[Tweed]

5. Used the line arrow thing here in Illinois

Think it works the best. No hanging chads, very hard to confuse the voter's intent.

[Kittycat]

3. Bubbles here.

[ElsewheresDaughter]

6. lever machines in NY

[CottonBear]

8. Unfortunately, Georgia has been 100% Diebold since 2002.

:(

On the plus side, there are no huge lines or any apparent problems at the polls in my little blue city.

[PresidentObama]

9. Connect the arrow.

[kestrel91316]

10. We use Inkavote in Los Angeles. You fill in the circle with a big black marker.

It's hard to screw up. And if you screw up, you can get a replacement ballot.

[Peace Patriot]

11. Learn more about your voting system in L.A.

For one thing, the county uses "centralized tabulation"--the least secure system (as opposed to "precinct-based tabulation," with required posting of the results at the precinct--there is no local posting with "centralized tabulation"). "Centralized tabulation" greatly enhances opportunity for fraud. Your voting card, and 4 million others, are trucked to pickup locations, and all then go on to one location, Norwalk, and are shunted by the vat load into an ELECTRONIC tabulator, which is run on "trade secret," proprietary code, and which the county calls MTS (Micro Tally System), but local election reform activists suspect is a Diebold GEMS tabulator (very bad). (The county has been secretive about it.) And out come the magic numbers, with only a 1% check (very, very inadequate) of the actual vote cards against the machine tally.

Secondly, L.A. county has had one of the most corrupt, pro-corporate, anti-reform Registrars of Voters in the entire state for over a decade--Conny McCormack--who just resigned (Dec 07) amidst a storm of controversy about her coziness with the corporate vendors--and the person running your elections is her hand-picked successor, Dean Logan (who has a very dubious record in his previous venue, Washington State).

McCormack tried to bring Diebold early voting touchscreens to L.A. The new reforming Sec of State, Debra Bowen, stopped that. McCormack gave Diebold the entire Absent Ballot concession in L.A. And she larded the equally bad ES&S (closely tied to Diebold) with a $25 million contract for the completely unnecessary InkaVote-Plus scanners, which do nothing but check for overvotes (the voters can do that), and provide "snap tallies" (unofficial results) for corporate exit pollsters in 20 (out of 4,000) precincts. And now McCormack is in the newspapers criticizing Bowen for her reforms, and likely scheming with other "bad actor" registrars to reverse those reforms, and prevent any more. (San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino county registrars recently sued SoS Bowen to stop her improved auditing rules. McCormack is best friends with the San Diego county registrar, Deborah Seiler, who was formerly Diebold's chief salesperson in California, and has ganged up with these county registrars, and a few others, in the past, to prevent badly needed reforms.)

Please see "California Election Integrity Assessment 2008" for more detail, on L.A. and other CA county election systems. And see Comment 2 for more on McCormack.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x4380748

Frankly, I'd rather have a bunch of people messing around with punchcards and trying to decipher "hanging chads"--out where we can see them--that any electronic machine, Diebold or otherwise, run on "trade secret" code, doing its own, or rather its corporate programmers', interpretation of how 4 million people voted.

Best solution: 100% hand-counted paper ballots, and posting of the results at the precinct. Next best: an open-source code electronic system, with a 55% hand-count audit (like they do in Venezuela). Third best: optiscan (with a ballot) and a 50% or more hand-count (bare minimum needed to detect fraud--10%). (Standard audit in California--1%!) And in all cases: LOCAL posting before any "central" tabulation. (Even with a substantial audit, "central" tabulation removes the process from local observers, who would be most likely to notice weird totals, and from the people in general--it reduces observation and participation.)

[kestrel91316]

13. I agree with your "best solution". And I have never totally trusted voting

here in LA. 4 years ago I reregistered Republican because I half expected to be denied my vote at the polling place in Nov 04 as a Democrat.

Voter registration forms are supposed to be available at our post offices and libraries, but are nowhere to be found. DMV (motor voter) was supposed to have reregistered me when I moved in Oct but that obviously never happened. I downloaded and mailed in a paper registration (finding none at the PO or library, lol) but got my sample ballot and absentee ballot request form too late to go absentee. So I have to go to my polling place tonight and hope it gets counted.

Connie McCormack can't have been TOO crooked. LA goes blue pretty reliably.

[Peace Patriot]

15. "LA goes blue pretty reliably." Election fraud, especially with these high-speed,

"trade secret" coded electronic voting machines and tabulators, owned and controlled by rightwing corporations, and with the EASY potential of inserting sophisticated vote distribution capabilities--may not be as obvious as a "blue" county going "red." There is evidence in 2004, for instance, that small percentages of votes were stolen in many, many places, including L.A., to manufacture and pad Bush/Cheney's national popular majority. L.A. may not be turned "blue" but the vote totals may not be as "blue" as they should have been.

In L.A.'s case, the likeliest place for fraud to occur would be in the central tabulator (which local election reform activists believe is a Diebold GEMS tabulator). Also, electronic fraud can be used--and it is very easy to do--to elect supervisors and state legislators who are friendly to corporate-run elections, no matter which party--so that rightwing fascist/corporate control is in place for the biggies, like keeping Bush/Cheney in power in 2004. Some day, after you've taken your heart medication, sit down and ask yourself: Why would any Democratic office holder support, vote for, protect, and cover up for rightwing corporations 'counting' all our votes with "trade secret," proprietary programming code, and no audit/recount controls?

Really, it's very shocking.

Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia have the capability to determine our Democratic Party nominees in any primary. And they all have very close ties to the Republican Party, the Bush/Cheney regime and/or far rightwing causes. High speed, invisible, untraceable vote changing--one hacker, a couple of minutes, a few lines of code--with the potential to change literally millions of votes throughout any state's electronic system. All the code is written in private corporate offices.

And if you think controls are in place to prevent malicious code in our election system, consider this: SoS Bowen just sued ES&S for $15 million for selling nearly 1,000 uncertified voting machines to several counties (including San Francisco). Uncertified means no logic and accuracy tests by the state. No one reviewed the code. She caught them, but she's tough (and they're fighting her tooth and nail). How many times have they gotten away with this? Most states DON'T have a tough SoS. We has a Diebold shill only a year ago. Many counties in CA have corporate toadies as registrars. All the security systems are like this--porous--and often overly dependent on the attitude of election officials (tough, or lax).

The system is made to order for widespread, undetectable, rightwing corporate election fraud. And many of our Democratic office holders have aided and abetted it.

It's a difficult truth to face. But once we face it, it's clear what must be done. We have to rid our elections of these private "bad actor" corporations, and all private interests. We've started by getting a ballot or "voter verified paper audit trail" for every vote in CA--and other states are going this way, too. Next, have to demand a better audit (hand-count of ballots against machine totals). Previous SoS's put in place a 1% audit. That is woefully inadequate (especially in a "trade secret" code system--ye gods!). Bowen just improved the audit rule for close elections (10% audit if the margin is 0.5% or less, and escalated auditing if anomalies show up in the 1% standard audit). And guess what? The Registrar of San Diego--the former Diebold chief salesperson in Calif (yup, you read that right)--sued SoS Bowen to stop this modest reform, and was joined by the Registrars of Riverside and San Bernardino Counties (two other "bad actors"). Bowen won the suit, but still--backsliding is always possible, and we have so far to go to re-store transparent vote counting, we can't afford any backsliding.

Anyway, WITH a ballot--something countable--we can work toward a fully verifiable vote, with the present corporate optiscan system. In fact, if we were actually counting all those ballots, or even half of them, or even 10% of them as the standard audit, there would be far less of a problem. You can permit secret code if there is a full audit, or (temporary compromise) an audit that is sufficient (according to statistical analysts) to detect fraud and error. (Kathy Dopp says 5% to 10%, depending on circumstances.)

But the corps don't want it, and are fighting all such reforms. Guess why? It's not money. Currently they get oodles of money, no matter the system. Bad guy buys touchscreens. Good guy comes in and insists on optiscans, or more security. The corps profit, selling it all. In L.A., Diebold got the concession for printing all Absentee Ballots! ES&S got a $25 million contract to install scanners that merely check for over-votes--when the fed law required it. It's all quite a scam. And it must be stopped. But the only way to do that is to work for more and more transparency, so we can elect more and more officials who act in our interest. Sometimes we can do that despite the machines (voters can outvote the machines, because the corps generally don't want to make their fraud too obvious). (I think that's how Bowen got elected--awesome grass roots work on voter education and turnout.) This is much too chancy, however, and much too difficult. Activists will burn out. We have to change the system itself, county by county, state by state--and restore a culture of public service in our elections.

[kestrel91316]

16. Have you perhaps mistaken me for someone else? I am certainly NO FAN

of any hackable, cheatable vote tabulating system.

All I did was state that we have Inkavote. Sheesh. I KNOW it's not a perfect system, but it beats hell out of an electronic voting machine that switches my Kerry vote to Bush on the sly........we now have a hard copy paper trail not subject to "hanging chads".

[Peace Patriot]

17. Sorry, Kestrel01316, I really didn't mean to imply that.

I was just saying that I think L.A.'s voting system has been designed to appear benign, when it isn't. It is deceptively easy and innocent looking. The dangers are well hidden. The InkaVote voting station is not electronic, so you wouldn't know that electronics are involved, and in an extremely vulnerable and insecure way, by the feel of the thing, and what you observe--your experience voting. You'd really have to look into it--which I did for this lengthy, detailed assessment of CA's election system for the Election forum.

You also wouldn't know of the L.A. Registrar's close ties to Diebold, and big contracts to them, and also to ES&S, from just the voting experience, or general news reading. Diebold machines are almost nowhere in evidence to most voters. After reviewing all the state's systems, and the widespread use of Diebold and ES&S machines, I began wondering why the Registrar--with her tight ties to Diebold--implemented a special system for L.A., in use nowhere else. I used to live in L.A. Born there, in fact. But that was a long time ago--when punchcards were still in use. So I talked with Judy Alter, an extremely well-informed election integrity activist in L.A., at length on the phone several times, and developed a feel for the entire L.A. system, which I think is something of a ruse. The voters are being fooled. The real action is all in Norwalk, where these 4 million voting cards are fed into a Diebold GEMS tabulator (by another name), with total--and I mean total--control over the results. It's all very, very secretive, what happens there. And, until SoS Bowen came along, god only knows if they even did the 1% required audit, or if it was truly random and honest.

You're right that it's better to have a ballot, a voting card or some kind of paper trail, than not to have it. But it's like, you have to have a mouth to eat, right? First priority is getting a mouth. But it's just the first step. Taste buds and a tongue, and a nose, also help. And a stomach. Then you have to find food, then you have to prepare it to your liking. Etc. Etc. Getting a mouth is essential, but not much use without a tongue et al. (I guess you could swallow tasteless liquids!)

It's what our "public servants" DO with the ballot or voting card, that makes the ballot or voting card a meaningful object. If they don't count it, it's just a piece of paper, without significance or power. It has potential to be counted. That's a step. Then what?

Election reform has to come in steps. The system is so corrupt that at first it seemed immovable. Election activists have proven otherwise, but, god, it's like moving a mountain, spoonful of dirt by spoonful of dirt. And I hesitate to point out to people, who have just carried their thousandth spoonful of dirt across the Mojave Desert--and are exhausted and triumphant that they made it--how much further we have to go. Because of reaction's like yours. All my info and analysis just makes you tired. Sorry I had that effect. And I have to tell you, it is absolutely wonderful to see so many people starting to move the mountain. It's happening--but we should never let up, until we have full transparency.

[Shine]

12. I connected two ends of an arrow with a pen here in CA on my absentee ballot.

:hi:

[Madam Mossfern]

14. A rinky dink touch screen

that make any toddler's toy seem sophisticated. Don't know what it is but I feel like it's going to collapse any minute.