Posted on 05/12/2006 5:30:36 AM PDT by Brilliant
Some advocates of a 2002 law mandating upgrades of the nation's voting machinery now worry the overhaul is making things worse.
With the 2006 midterm elections approaching, proponents of the Help America Vote Act are filing lawsuits to block some state and election officials' efforts to comply with the act.
The Help America Vote Act called for upgrading election equipment to guard against another contested outcome such as the 2000 presidential vote. Among the flaws in balloting almost six years ago were antiquated hand-operated voting machines and punch-card ballots that were difficult to read. To redress that, members of Congress pushed for modernization, which could include touch-screen voting machines...
The lawsuits -- nine so far -- coincide with a stampede by state and county officials to spend $3 billion allocated by Congress to help pay for upgrades. To comply with the Help America Vote Act, a number of states and dozens of counties purchased touch-screen voting machines. The deadline for spending the money is tied to each state's 2006 primary dates...
The Help America Vote Act "has been turned on its head and it's causing more problems than solutions at this point," says Lowell Finley, a San Francisco lawyer and cofounder of Voter Action, a nonpartisan organization that is bringing some of the lawsuits...
Critics of the touch-screen voting method are following two lines of attack: the machines are unreliable and some local election officials have become too dependent on an industry that already has too much control over testing and operating the sophisticated equipment...
Despite common charges that the machines lack adequate security, no cases have emerged proving that a hacker or an insider has or could electronically manipulate the vote...
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
It's the very foundation of their electoral policies.
What's going on here is that the leftwingnuts in Brazil ran with Lula and electronic touchscreen voting. He won. The Dems figured they would also win ~ being leftwingnuts and all.
They figured wrong. No reason for Republicans to turn their backs on this proven technology.
How can anyone object to voter ID with a straight face? Let me know when the results in NYC, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit are verifiable. Til then I am snoozing.
With all this pining and nostalgia for paper ballots, does "secret ballot" every come up in the debate? Or was that key concept expunged from the public consciousness?
For everyone's education
Open Vote Consortium - http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/
Nonsense. The Dems tried to win 2000 by cheating as they have since Boss Tweed and Tammny Hall in the 1860s. The Dem Party has become the Urban Party with big city political machines manufacturing the votes they need to win. They have repeatedly blocked voter identification, advocated such "reforms" as motor voter, rushed through the citizenship of immigrants prior to the 1996 election, registered illegal aliens to vote, pushed for the lifting of voting restrictions on convicted felons, and now are defending bilingual ballots. The Dems can only win through cheating.
Bush didn't blow Gore away in 2000, Gore received more popular votes nationally and Bush took Florida by a few hundred votes. The Dems want to get rid of the electoral college so they win by cheating in the big cities.
Now that Bush's poll numbers are at 29%, they figure that they can't lose unless someone cheats. So they are trying to undo the shenanigans they've already pulled.
Voter fraud is a major problem in this country and it is being perpetrated by the Dems. They want to switch back to paper ballots because they are easier to manufacture. I can recall a Florida Dem campaign worker being found with a punch card machine in her trunk.
But of course, the left knows full well that electronic voting is not tamper proof. No way to bring suddenly discovered bags of paper ballots from the hinterlands to change the true outcome of an election.
Yeah, OK. You have to be able to read for reading to be difficult, have at least rudimentary skills, like "knowing the frikkin' alphabet"!
FMCDH(BITS)
OOOPPPPSSSSS. Make that electronic voting is NOW tamper proof.
Some people are just too dumb to vote. The lefts solution lets bring everything in society down to the dumbest person.
***How can anyone object to voter ID with a straight face?**
Not real well.......
Looks like Dean is going to face a subpeona in Indiana over his Comments.....
Do you ever feel as if Republicans are being suckers to clean up balloting while Dems just laugh and keep on doing what they have been doing. Count on three weeks to produce a democratic victor in WA, for instance.
Whatever makes you think that paper ballots are NOT secret??? There is no "personal identifying mark" on a paper ballot.
Best of all worlds is what we have here in Washington. Voter marks paper ballot, feeds it into a machine reader, machine reader "checks" ballot and returns it if incorrect for another try (unreadable marks, not fully filled out, double votes for same office, etc.), and then, once correctly filled out, STORES THE PAPER BALLOT INTERNALLY in a sealed bin so the paper ballot can be used for verification.
And how, exactly, will they know whose fingerprints those are?? There is no national registry of fingerprints--just the FBI registry of fingerprints of CRIMINALS.
Dean claimed that hundreds of people were disenfranchised by Indiana's new Voter ID law during the primaries...
Yet when the State Dem Party was asked to provide the NAMES of those people, they REFUSED.....
That's interfering with the investigation of a CRIME, and the AG intends to pursue it......
Freedom of polispeech doesn't apply when you accuse someone of a CRIME.....
Because these pinheads to day are clamoring for a "receipt" as part of a paper trail. That means they can exchange their ballot directly for goodies. I'm no crook, so maybe their good-word is sufficient, dunno. Pretty much these days everyone wears their vote on their sleeve.
No one is going back to punch cards. The paper ballots used in Florida cannot be manufactured or padded. The ballots are numbered and the numbers can be audited against the numbers signed for by the voters. This type of ballot has a nearly 100 percent record on recounts. Even in the 2000 Florida recount.
When such a ballot is marked with a pen or small ink stamp, it's almost impossible to get mismarked ballots since the inked area is both easily readable by machine and hand counts.
The "receipt" only applies to paperless electronic voting (which I think is totally un-acceptable--too easy for someone to "hack the program"). In the system I described, there is no need for any "receipt". I fail to see what "..exchange their ballot directly for goodies " has to do with ballot security.
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.