"We know that on Nov. 4, voting systems will fail somewhere," says Lawrence Norden, director of voting technology at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. "There is no perfect system. All of these systems have problems." Full Story »
Posted by Fabrice Florin
The USA Today article is somewhat dismissive of the many problems with voting systems. That suggests either superficial research, or an agenda. Machine qualification tests have failed, have been manufacturer self-adminstered, and falsified. Software code in voting machines and vote counting machines are corporate secrets, and have been shown to be easily hackable. Voting data has been shown to be accessable from uncontrolled computers. Machine maintenance is performed by unregulated private corporation "experts," not election boards. Voting machine companies benefited because the republican owners of the companies conned congress into believing they were a solution. In many ways, it sounds like execution of the Shock Doctrine. After including a statement that no machine errors have been found, the article later reports som machine errors that were found. The federal investigations of ACORN are reported without any note that the investigations were at the request of Republican operatives and supported by the Republican president and his politicized department of justice, and are strongly objected to by Democrats. There are better articles on voting problems.
“The touch screens were perfect. We never had any scandals,” Merriman says, even without a paper trail.
Ye gads! With no trail, you can never prove a scandal. Testing has shown hackability. Reported voting has differed significantly from exit polling. This statement is BS and not identified as such.
“A lot of the conspiracy theorists got to the voters,” says Pamela Goodman, president of Palm Beach County League of Women Voters. “There was a big lack of voter confidence.”
Concerned citizens who sought out and found real problems are not evil “conspiracy theorists,” and this statement was not appropriately explored nor was the libel qualified.
Many specialists, such as Glenn Newkirk of InfoSENTRY in North Carolina, say the machines usually aren’t the problem — it’s human error.
Human error is usually random; machine error can drastically swing results, and any such error tends to be bigger. The number of errors is not the problem, the problem is potential intentional errors in key precincts of swing states. That is the strategy seen in 2004.
Officials are confident the system can withstand a tsunami of voters that already has begun at 11 early voting sites around the county. All the scanners have passed their accuracy tests, and new procedures — along with yellow police tape — are in place to prevent lost ballots.
Software code has been changed and left untested after machine qualification tests. Qualification tests need to be performed by the election officials, not the manufacturer; and software in use has to public and open for inspection.
Local citizens need to take back oversight to ensure validity of the vote. Paper ballots are a necessity. Software in voting machines and vote counting machines needs to be open and public. Random count audits should be mandatory. Election official offices should be non-partisan, and include computer savvy as a job requirement. (Osgood in Washington) The ACORN investigation is a Republican fraud to detract attention from their vote caging and voter suppression strategy. Conspiracy to disenfranchise voters should be criminally prosecuted. The site www.blackboxvoting.org has some excellent information on problems.