Maryland Will Return To Paper Ballots In 2016
Source: CBS Local
BALTIMORE (WJZ) — The search is on for new machines to replace Maryland’s touch screen voting system.
Political reporter Pat Warren reports the state is moving toward a paper trail.
Maryland voters raised a ruckus in 2004 after the state moved to electronic voting machines that eliminated paper ballots and still raises suspicions.
“We want every time you vote in Maryland, you get a receipt,” said one protester.
To avoid the fear of computers eating voters, the General Assembly set 2016 as the goal for instituting a paper ballot system and now it’s time to shop.
Read more: http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2013/11/20/maryland-will-return-to-paper-ballots-in-2016/
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Aristus
(66,316 posts)Smart thinking.
You can keep the electronic voting as well, if you want. But here's a tip: don't use proprietary vote-couting software! Does it make sense to have the votes tallied by the people who own the software? I don't think so...
billhicks76
(5,082 posts)C'mon guys. All states need to do this. Who knows how many votes have been stolen. I'll bet we have one by MUCH bigger margins than we have been told and won races we officially lost. Remember what Stalin said : " It's not who gets the most votes that matters, it's who counts the votes".
Paper Roses
(7,473 posts)We can be sure elections are fair and that recounts are accurate.
ErikJ
(6,335 posts)Ireland decided this week to scrap their voting machines--like the ones here stored in Dublin. They're selling them for scrap metal, because they found they were too unreliable and too easy to hack. They'd only used them once, back in 2002, but that was enough. Unfortunately, America hasn't learned as quickly as the Irish. It used to be in America that exit polls were the gold standard to determine if there were shenanigans in an election. For over a century we used them, and we got very, very good at it. They almost never deviated by more than a few tenths of a point from the actual electoral outcome, and when they did, it was a sure sign of fraud.
Such a sure sign that exit polls were used successfully to expose - and then overturn - fraudulent elections in Ukraine, Serbia, and Georgia. Polling companies were really good at this, and had great success in the election of 1998, when voting machines only recorded 7 percent of the national vote. But in the elections of 2000 and 2002, something odd began to happen. It was called "red shift" because, in certain states where there were a lot of voting machines being used, Republican candidates did better in the vote the machines reported than in the exit polls. In the election of 2004, New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Ohio led the charge with a red shift toward George W. Bush of 276,000 votes in New York, 228,000 in Florida, 190,000 in Pennsylvania, 169,000 in Ohio.
It had started two years earlier, in 2002, when voting machines began to appear everywhere across America because George W. Bush signed into effect a law called the Help America Vote Act or HAVA that gave billions of dollars to the states so they could buy these machines from private corporations like Diebold and ES&S. It was the high water point of the privatization of our vote. For two centuries, our vote was counted by volunteers and government workers overseen by representatives of the political parties. That all changed between 2000 and 2004 - now over 90 percent of our vote is recorded or counted in secret on corporate machines, and those corporations tell us who one our elections. Why is it secret? Because, the voting machine companies say, they have copyright and trademark "rights" to keep their software and hardware secret from us.
....................... http://www.democraticunderground.com/101738459
Stevepol
(4,234 posts)First, if the average voter could not verify the vote or understand how the vote would be verified, it's impossible to have a democracy.
Second, it is too easy to manipulate the outcome of the vote and too easy to escape detection unless there is a clear way to verify the vote and computer vote-counting does not allow for a certain verification process.
www.edri.org/edri-gram/number7.5/no-evoting-germany
Blue Owl
(50,349 posts)Let's hope the trend spills over to other states! Like all fifty of them.
RC
(25,592 posts)Once they leave the voting area, they have no standing. Besides the voting machine can print out how you voted, but store something totally different in the voting machine memory.
Paper ballots, that can be hand counted, is the only way to go.
Scuba
(53,475 posts)
And counters selected like jurors because this is another responsibility of citizenship.
Laelth
(32,017 posts)-Laelth
littlewolf
(3,813 posts)silvershadow
(10,336 posts)
Blandocyte
(1,231 posts)Ok, maybe not that. But hellz yeah for paper ballots! There should always be a paper trail in elections!
kath
(10,565 posts)In front of plenty of observers.
Works fine for Canada.
Kelvin Mace
(17,469 posts)but not in practice. I have been over this repeatedly and the empirical evidence shows that the best system is OpScan with random hand counts.
Ballots in this country frequently are way too complex to count accurately by hand, and the more you handle the ballots the greater the possibility of error. Think back to the California ballot when Arnold ran for governor in 2003. If memory serves the California recall ballot had over 130 candidates.
In your typical election during a presidential race, ballots can run multiple pages when you add in state/local races and ballot initiatives and/or bond votes.
With proper auditing safeguards, OpScan will yield a more accurate count, while retaining a physical ballot that can be counted in the event of questions, legal or technical.
kath
(10,565 posts)Kelvin Mace
(17,469 posts)You will not find 135 people running for governor.
Canada's election laws are all federal. U.S. election law ares federal, state, county and city. In essence, there is ONE way to design a ballot, one standard for counting, one standard for registering, voting early and registering to vote. In the U.S. all of these issues are covered in the 50 state laws, 3,007 county laws, and the 36,000+ townships/municipalities.
So, in Canada there is one way to conduct an election, in the U.S. there are 39,000+ ways to conduct an election.
All that is required to vote in Canada is to check a box on your tax return.
Canada's system versus the U.S. system is apples and quarks.
devils chaplain
(602 posts)They were easy to understand, easy to complete, and you could watch the machine accept or reject the ballot.
The problem in 2000 was the stupid butterfly ballot which -- ironically through the "butterfly effect" -- resulted in an even more stupid war in Iraq.
RussBLib
(9,006 posts)...if they would only put it on the ballot. I'm sure there are a few dark forces working to prevent that.
Kelvin Mace
(17,469 posts)Touchscreen voting systems were unreliable wastes of money that imperiled democracy?
Wait, we did, right here, about 10 years ago.
LeftishBrit
(41,205 posts)The UK still uses paper ballots, and may it always do so.
Judi Lynn
(160,516 posts)
druidity33
(6,446 posts)wait a minute... computers can eat voters?
Definitely get rid of them. Paper ballots forever!
Of course there's the damn paper cuts...
Thor_MN
(11,843 posts)I'm afraid I can't do that Dave...
Nom, nom, nom.
lonestarnot
(77,097 posts)
brooklynite
(94,501 posts)They're not planning to hand count millions of paper ballots on Election Day. When NYS did this, everyone here complained that you couldn't trust the scanners either.
