Sunday, March 14, 2004
That electronic voting machines could make a travesty of election 2004 dawns on the Times editorial board
And not a moment too soon.
All well and good, but the Times gets one point wrong, and fails to paint the larger picture.
The technical point is this: The real issue is not a rogue or winger programmer hijacking the election, but simple programming errors that cause the wrong totals to go into the system, after which they cannot be checked. Have you ever had an error on your bank statement? Multiply that by 100,000,000 voters, and then consider that Bush "won" Florida by 537 votes (after Jebbie had gotten a Texas-based data processing firm to throw tens of thousands of legitimate Democratic voters off the rolls, of course).
The bigger picture is this: There is little enough reason to regard the current Bush regime as legitimate (see back here) and if there's any problem with the 2004 vote, there's less than no reason.
Four years after Florida made a mockery of American elections, there is every reason to believe it could happen again. This time, the problems will most likely be with the electronic voting that has replaced chad-producing punch cards. Some counties, including Bay County, use paper ballots that are fed into an optical scanner, so a recount is possible if there are questions. But 15 Florida counties, including Palm Beach, home of the infamous "butterfly ballot," have adopted touch-screen machines that do not produce a paper record. If anything goes wrong in these counties in November, we will be in bad shape.
Florida's official line is that its machines are so carefully tested, nothing can go wrong. But things already have gone wrong. In a January election in Palm Beach and Broward Counties, the victory margin was 12 votes, but the machines recorded more than 130 blank ballots. It is simply not believable that 130 people showed up to cast a nonvote, in an election with only one race on the ballot. The runner-up wanted a recount, but since the machines do not produce a paper record, there was nothing to recount.
In 2002, in the primary race for governor between Janet Reno and Bill McBride, electronic voting problems were so widespread they cast doubt on the outcome.
(via The Times)
All well and good, but the Times gets one point wrong, and fails to paint the larger picture.
The technical point is this: The real issue is not a rogue or winger programmer hijacking the election, but simple programming errors that cause the wrong totals to go into the system, after which they cannot be checked. Have you ever had an error on your bank statement? Multiply that by 100,000,000 voters, and then consider that Bush "won" Florida by 537 votes (after Jebbie had gotten a Texas-based data processing firm to throw tens of thousands of legitimate Democratic voters off the rolls, of course).
The bigger picture is this: There is little enough reason to regard the current Bush regime as legitimate (see back here) and if there's any problem with the 2004 vote, there's less than no reason.
