The Great Unraveling Author -- Has Krugman uncovered a voting-booth conspiracy? Of course not.

National Review Online ^ | Dec. 3, 2003 | Donald Luskin

[ReleaseTheHounds]

More Krugman... stammering about the surging economy, this time... Unraveling.

[ReleaseTheHounds]

Krugman Truth Squad PING!

[swilhelm73]

Meanwhile, somewhere a group of Democrat party plumbers reading "Rigging Electronic Voting Machines for Dummies" is smiling.

So when they get caught, much like in Florida, they can claim the evidence of their fraud is proof of Republican voter fraud.

[KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle]

G-d bless and keep the good and tireless warriors of the Krugman Truth Squad! :)

[gimmealewinsky]

Their "proof" will simply be that "shock" the people actually voted Republican. That can't be, the machines were fixed like we said, see!

[Timeout]

First the libbers tried to convince us the media is too conservative.

Now they're accusing Republicans of fixing elections.

Do they write this stuff while gazing in the mirror?!

[GluteusMax]

The problem is, Diebold machines can be hacked.

What is the urgency to have results by the damn 10 o'clock news anyway?

A paper trail ensures an honest election. Period. (Anybody remember chads? Numerous recounts validated the results. Not possible with pixels.)

Throwing out the baby with the bath water is foolish. Electronic voting is dangerous and stupid.

[F.J. Mitchell]

This guy's lies are a bigger threat to the survival of this country than the terrorists are. A loose cannon of monsterous proportions.

[SAJ]

A paper trail **is** possible, using a combination of multithread key (or touch) logs, standard DB, and paper receipt (a la Visa cards). You want independently threaded and operationally different keystroke logs in case ONE of them gets hacked, the DB for general review purposes, and the receipts (two copies, of course, one for the voter and the other to go into a ''ballot'' box, as paper ballots do right now) for purposes of hard recounts. Upload the e-tally (the DB) to Election Central or wherever, retaining the receipts against the potential desirability of a recount.

It would be extremely difficult to corrupt all three subsystems (five, actually) simultaneously, and the voting results would be available as quickly or more so than now, in some huge majority of cases.

[CO_dreamer]

I'm with you. I like the ballots I used last year. Plain old paper optical scanned ballots. Easy to mark, easy to read the results, easy to re-scan if necessary.

I don't like the fact that there is absolutely no proof after the fact, no paper trail.

Electronic voting would be fine if there was a private means of determining that your vote was actually tabulated correctly. e.g., you get a ballot number assigned to you which you can review on a website.

[kevao]

In the smear-journalist's lexicon, "apparently" means "has not."

In Krugman's defense, in post-Clinton America, "apparently" can mean "has not."

[chiller]

Whether electronic voting works perfectly or not is mute. Every Democratic loss (lots of those on the way,btw) will be cause for charges of vote fraud. One screwed up computer program anywhere will tarnish the accuracy of all electronic votes. We can't afford that.

Back to paper.

[Irene Adler]

"I'm with you. I like the ballots I used last year. Plain old paper optical scanned ballots. Easy to mark, easy to read the results, easy to re-scan if necessary."

I agree. They work great where I vote.

[chiller]

mute=moot, oops.

[At _War_With_Liberals]

His columns cater to NYC and European leftists.

[GluteusMax]

A paper trail **is** possible

A paper trail is a must. The last two elections I voted using this system. There was no tangible record of my vote. Only that I had "participated" via the log of who in my precinct voted that day. Your proposed system would be a vast improvement over what is currently the case. Hopefully we won't conveniently "vote away" many rights before a verifiable system is in place.

[KC_Conspirator]

I'll tell you what that liar Krugman won't - that for right now, electronic voting machines are more of secure way to stop voter fraud, and without punch card vote fraud (or any vote fraud) in heavy democrat districts, the democrats will lose elections.

This is such a huge lie on massive proportions that he ought to be jailed.

[GluteusMax]

When someone says "this isn't about money," you can be sure it's all about money. And when Paul Krugman says "there's nothing paranoid about suggesting" something, you can be sure that what he's suggesting is a crackpot conspiracy theory — built on lies and innuendo — that only a true paranoid could believe.

And when someone starts off an article trying to paint something with the tinfoil brush you can be sure they are trying to divert one's attention from something they prefer you don't look at too deeply.

Associating a danger to liberty with a kook (or to FReepers, with a Liberal) is a classic way to keep them from noticing the threat to themselves. Produce a piece of paper counted by both sides at the local level to ensure no fraud occurs. How hard is that to understand?

[Steve_Seattle]

When I first read Krugman's column, I KNEW there was an innocuous explantion for the "rob-Georgia.zip" folder name. How did I know? Because it was Krugman. (By the way, who is the "Bev Harris" referred to in the story? The author mentions her as if her identity is already known, but there was no prior reference to her.)

[Steve_Seattle]

I voted using punch-card machines for twnety years, and no one ever suggested they were unreliable until the Gore fiasco in Florida.