[OT] some info you need to know

[Alan Dayley]

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Matt Nesteruk wrote:
> Sounds to me like one team is already making excuses of why they lost.
>  The Election was stolen from them!  Those darn elephants did it again!

The argument about voting machine use and security has been turned into
a partisan one by some, but it should not be.

The flaws in the development, implementation, operation and complexity
of use are glaring and obvious, or should be.  And that doesn't even
address the issues of closed source and the Freedom protections offered
by a fully open process.

Hanging chads are to computerized voting machine as long grass is to
move to a new house.

It's a vastly overly complex, possible problem ridden, easily broken or
manipulated solution to a very minor problem for a system that has
functioned well for decades!

It is, in a word, an embarrassment.

One example: Broward County, Florida, January 2004.  A special election
for a state legislature seat where one candidate wins by only 12 votes
triggers the mandatory recount.  The recount shows that in one
particular location had 134 under votes, meaning 134 people showed up to
vote but the count of total votes did not include those people.  These
undervotes could not be tracked or recounted because all they could do
was ask the computer voting machines what the totals were.  Which, of
course, reported the same undervote count.  Did people go to the poll
and not vote or did the machines simply not record the votes properly?
No way to tell.

(The original story is no longer freely available on the newspaper
website (The Sun-Sentinel) but can be found here:
http://www.verifiedvotingfoundation.org/article.php?id=1035 )

Alan

(Speaking as a fiscal, social and governmental conservative.)

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