Posted on 11/22/2004 10:43:29 AM PST by b4its2late
Again, have both dem and republican judges look at the paper receipts as the votes are being tabulated on a computer. And we should have strong networks to raise hell if they try to cheat.
I don't care if it's in the middle of Detroit, if we've got judges watching every vote and counting them as they go along, we'll be fine. Especially if we have paper receipts.
Then we won't have to speculate. We can come up with paper receipts for ATMs, surely we can do it for our democracy.
BIZERKLY says? oh puleeze..... Not like they don't have an agenda.
We use the optical scanning machines here. You mark the bubble for each office and take it over and scan the form into the machine. The machine records the vote electronically and the form you filled out is the "paper trail." It's cheap and effective. I don't understand why everyone doesn't use it.
So Dubya carried the electron vote.
As a research scientist, I use several multivariate models in my work. What I can honestly say about this Berkely work is that the model is only as good as the variables you select to construct the model. If you don't identify EVERY influence on the data you provide for the model construction, you cannot have a model that is highly robust and it will fail when unidentified factors influence the result. There are many more factors involved in the decision of who to vote for and this model largley looks at past voting trends.
"We don't think that this is a case where you really can model behavior of voters in the voting booth," Cohen said. "There are all kinds of factors that cause voters to vote a particular way " the economy, the war on terrorism, and in that geographic area (heavily Jewish), Israel and U.S. relations with Israel."
This Cohen fellow understands the deficiencies in modeling human behaviour. One other possibility is that the paper system before was corrupted by Dem voter fraud and now the correct voting pattern has been established. Wasn't the previous Broward county elections supervisor an incompetent Dem hack that the state had to replace?
People don't realize how easy it is to game hand ballots. All you need to do is to punch 1 hole in a stack of punch card ballots and you will guarantee that the machine counters will reject ALL of the ballots except for the hole pre-punched in the candidate of your choice. This is just one of many ways to slip additional votes into the stream. There are many more.
Any "paper" trail of electronic votes can be programmed to produce erroneous hard copy as easily as an erroneous count. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that unscrupulous poll workers wouldn't use phony challenges based on paper outputs to invalidate valid electronic votes.
The key to electronic voting is real-time certification of program code and microcode, and this is the only workable check on electronic voting. Electronic voting is vastly more honest than hand voting. Embrace the 20th century (before the 21st century runs out).
Who needs actual elections. From now on political offices will be determined by Berkeley studies
I'm not saying that you can't game paper ballots to throw off the original count. What I'm saying is that as both systems are generally now constructed, paper ballots are much more readily auditable/re-counted than e-ballots are.
I understand what you're saying; unfortunately what you're saying is dead false on its basic premise. Almost all fraud in hand precincts is injected into the process during the vote. There is no audit trail because the audit trail itself is an audit trail of nefarious practice. In e-voting, the nodes into which fraud enters the process are orders of magnitude fewer, and they are easily detectable. Not so with hand voting (except with a number of poll-watchers that would be prohibitive).
Why do you think the Democrats are so vehemently opposed to e-voting? Hint: it's not the lack of a paper-trail that bothers them.
OK, I can't mess with your knowledge. I can only use my common sense, which isn't always going to be right.
But I do think that as long as there are people watching on both sides, they can watch the printouts MORE EFFICIENTLY THAN THEY CAN WATCH THE "1s" AND "0s" IN THE COMPUTER. So it seems like a start to me.
I also understand that it's simple to hack the vote.
Thing about paper trails is, the voter can verify his or her votes. It's another mechanism to protect it.
I personally have heard that scantrons, put into machines and watched like hawks by both parties, are the way to go.
It IS the lack of a paper trail that bothers many. And, frankly, they're right on that one (as are many on our side).
If you don't mind not having a paper trail, don't get receipts when you make deposits at the bank or use the ATM.
Or is your money more important than your vote?
Sorry, but their request is not unreasonable. Don't forget: Leftie and Rightie alike can hack into the system.
You don't need to verify the outputs if you verify program correctness and then design the device so that it's impossible to be running anything other than certified code on election day. That can be done with machines. It can't be done with humans.
My friend, if you believe the Democrat Party has any interest whatsoever in eliminating voting fraud, you are living in a dream world. I can tell you this from personal experience: Before I went back to grad school to become a physicist, I was a shop steward, business agent, and later a union organizer. My 1st wife was a union organizer as well. I've worked the polls on both sides of the partisan divide and I assure you, the Democrats are interested in generating as many votes as they can, at any cost whatsoever.
If the Democrats wanted to eliminate fraud, they wouldn't have passed the NVRA ("motor voter") act of 1993, when they controlled the Presidency and both houses of Congress. This Bill enforces fraudulent practices in both State and Federal elections. Several states were required to amend their Constitutions to conform to it, because their voting requirements were "too stringent." Among the many opportunities for fraud that this bill enforces are: extreme difficulty in purging voter rolls, no identification requirements for voters, and mail-in registration without proper id. In addition, states with stringent ID requirements before 1994 had to drop them in many cases. No state may allow a new ID requirement in the future, and no state may enforce a more rigorous voter identification than any it had in place before 1994. The non-purging of voter roles is the reason many (almost exclusively urban) precincts have registered voters in excess of population, and is the biggest opportunity for fraud. Nearly all of the over-registered voters are Democrats, and that is no accident.
If you don't mind not having a paper trail, don't get receipts when you make deposits at the bank or use the ATM.
This ridiculous argument has nothing to do with voting. My ATM deposits and withdrawals aren't secret. Once I leave the ATM area, my face is on videotape, my signatures are on the checks, and my identity is matched to the transaction. No person can hold me answerable for anything I do in the voting booth, so I don't need to establish what happens there. In contrast, the IRS, PADoR, and many other government and private organizations do care what happens at the ATM, and so therefore, must I.
Or is your money more important than your vote?
A ludicrous "bumper sticker" talking point. My money is quantifiable against a personal aggregate history. My vote isn't. Furthermore, I don't let people stand next to me with their hands in my pocket at the ATM. We do allow Democrat operatives exactly this privilege before, during, and after the franchise is exercised.
Sorry, but their request is not unreasonable. Don't forget: Leftie and Rightie alike can hack into the system.
Wrong. This isn't some laughable Hollywood "thriller" written by some techno-clueless liberal-arts major where Hugh Jackman hacks his way into the Pentagon supercomputer at gunpoint while Halle Berry strokes his crotch. In the real world, hacking requires first and foremost access and second known vulnerabilities. Both of these can be controlled. They're trivial to isolate, and the programs are trivial to verify. Not so with the dishonest union thugs, lawyers, and ACORN profiteers manning the barricades at your local precinct. They are infinitely more cunning than any machine and there are literally millions of games they can play to generate votes in hand systems. The audit trail in those cases is, repeat after me, worth exactly: nothing.
Nothing.
Democrats fear electronic voting because one of the means by which they have stolen innumerable elections in the past will be shut off to them if e-voting becomes widespread. Everything else is just an excuse to fool people who aren't paying attention--like liberalism itself.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.