Wired reports about the never-ending voting fiasco in Florida. There are serious issues with the touch-screen voting machines that some politicians want to see widely deployed for the November elections -- just to avoid Hanging Chad and comply with a court order to modernize voting equipment.
The new touch-screen voting machines, aggressively marketed by a tiny handful of companies, carry risks that go to the heart of whether we can even trust election results. We're assured that if we place our elections in their computerized hands, we'll never have to worry about a nasty recount again.A professor of mine has been talking about this issue for over a decade. Wouldn't it be interesting if a few punched cards in a Presidential election were enough to (eventually) take down the electronic voting lobby?Most of these systems do avoid recounts -- by simply making recounts impossible. You trust the numbers from the voting machines, or ... you don't have an election. Problem solved, we're told.
Germany does that too. Look at this week-end's election where the SPD was ahead of the CSU by less than 9.000 out of 61.2 million electors. It only took until 4am to get the final results (I was always amazed at how long it took to recount Florida). Hand-counting works, why use machines for something that important?
How does the joke go again?
pdcawley on 2002-09-23T20:58:31
Ah yes...
Q: What is the difference between George W Bush and Adolf Hitler?
A: Hitler was democratically elected.
Re:I'm curious...
ziggy on 2002-09-24T16:07:41
Surely....has anyone considered manual counting? Unfortunately, voting technology in the US is determined at the municipal level. Every city and county decides how to set up its ballot boxes -- for local, state and federal elections. Larger areas (i.e., most cities) have been using voting machines for decades.
There's some possibility of vote fraud with electro-mechanical machines, but they have been used long enough, and the mechanisms are simple enough that they're viewed as an acceptable means of collecting ballots. With electronic voting, of course, there's no way to see if/how the vote counts have been tampered with in reporting or collection. (Fraud is always a possibility in reporting the ballots; look at the 1960 US Presidential election.)
