A Little Late
Election day is finally here. I awoke at 2:00AM feeling like a 5-year-old on Christmas Day, but the 60-year-old quickly let some of the anxiety and dread creep into the excitement. After five years of botched, perhaps even stolen, elections, can I expect this one to be any different? Many voters worry about the sheer mechanics of the voting and tabulating, especially because of the technology in place: electronic voting machines that have no paper trails for auditing purposes. Some of us have been screaming about this for the past two years, our opinions shored up by multiple articles citing concerns from prestigious and politically neutral experts. We have all been advised to loosen our tin-foil hats.
Today, the LA Times has finally seen fit to look into the issue in this editorial.
NEW VOTING MACHINES, like new computers, are generally faster than old ones. But as every computer user knows, reliability is often more important than speed. And a lot depends on who's using the machine and how.
...Some poll workers and computer scientists predict an election day plagued by long waits, glitches and miscounted votes. A more promising possibility is that, with the right equipment and procedures in place, electronic voting machines will deliver an unusually accurate and speedy count.
Unfortunately, the experience this election day is sure to fall somewhere in between. A number of states lack the safeguards necessary to address the machines' vulnerabilities to glitches and tampering. And even in states with those safeguards, such as California, the integrity of the results will depend on voters taking extra steps to make sure everything works as it should.
So far, the most common complaint about the electronic voting devices is that they break down or freeze too often, which is an engineering problem (and one hardly new to computer users). More troubling are the reports that some of the devices have inexplicably tallied the occasional vote for the wrong candidate. Computer experts also have demonstrated how easy it is to rig a machine's software (or hardware) to steal votes.
These problems highlight the need for machines to print and store a record of each vote as it is cast. Manufacturers have resisted putting printers in their machines, and only a portion of the states where the machines are being deployed have insisted on a paper trail. One of them is California, where 32 of the 58 counties will make routine use of the new machines on election day. (In Los Angeles County, voters mark paper ballots that are counted by optical scanners.) [Emphasis added]
It's election day, and a major newspaper finally gets around to commenting on the issue. Why wasn't this editorial, or one like it, written back when Senator Boxer co-sponsored a bill that would have required a paper trail in every precinct in the nation. That bill was introduced in 2005 but it never reached the Senate floor. Perhaps such an editorial would have raised awareness of the problem when it might have done some good.
And the cynic in me believes that's exactly why that editorial didn't show up until today.
Today, the LA Times has finally seen fit to look into the issue in this editorial.
NEW VOTING MACHINES, like new computers, are generally faster than old ones. But as every computer user knows, reliability is often more important than speed. And a lot depends on who's using the machine and how.
...Some poll workers and computer scientists predict an election day plagued by long waits, glitches and miscounted votes. A more promising possibility is that, with the right equipment and procedures in place, electronic voting machines will deliver an unusually accurate and speedy count.
Unfortunately, the experience this election day is sure to fall somewhere in between. A number of states lack the safeguards necessary to address the machines' vulnerabilities to glitches and tampering. And even in states with those safeguards, such as California, the integrity of the results will depend on voters taking extra steps to make sure everything works as it should.
So far, the most common complaint about the electronic voting devices is that they break down or freeze too often, which is an engineering problem (and one hardly new to computer users). More troubling are the reports that some of the devices have inexplicably tallied the occasional vote for the wrong candidate. Computer experts also have demonstrated how easy it is to rig a machine's software (or hardware) to steal votes.
These problems highlight the need for machines to print and store a record of each vote as it is cast. Manufacturers have resisted putting printers in their machines, and only a portion of the states where the machines are being deployed have insisted on a paper trail. One of them is California, where 32 of the 58 counties will make routine use of the new machines on election day. (In Los Angeles County, voters mark paper ballots that are counted by optical scanners.) [Emphasis added]
It's election day, and a major newspaper finally gets around to commenting on the issue. Why wasn't this editorial, or one like it, written back when Senator Boxer co-sponsored a bill that would have required a paper trail in every precinct in the nation. That bill was introduced in 2005 but it never reached the Senate floor. Perhaps such an editorial would have raised awareness of the problem when it might have done some good.
And the cynic in me believes that's exactly why that editorial didn't show up until today.
Labels: Election 2006, Voter Fraud
posted by Diane at 3:00 AM
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