Reply #7: Responding

[KaliTracy]

If electronic machines are going to be used at all, I want:

1. Independent certification of machine, with *every machine tested prior to election and officially sealed.

2. Paper Ballot that is placed into a lock box (and that voter can ck before putting into box -- not encrypted).

3. Touch screens that are able to withstand a few hundred/thousand touches in a given day -- I used to be a waitress and used touch-screens to place orders -- believe me, a customer would have gotten mighty upset if I ordered steak for them when I really pressed hamburger. This just doesn't happen much in the restaurant world, we and touch screens have been around for over 10 years -- I do not believe their claim of miscalibration (though I knew that's what they would say). If it *was* miscalibration, every poll worker should have been taught to calibrate -- It Isn't Hard at all.

4. I want a company that has NO political ties -- though that might be impossible to do -- I'm not sure one company having all of the contract is a good thing, either.

In DECEMBER 2003, these two articles were published, they might give you some talking points... and someone here might want to look up the article he mentions written by Paul Krugman and see what he's writing about right now!

Remember-- this is from December 2003--

"If you spend any time on the Internet in the U.S., it is almost impossible not to know about the scandal involving touch screen voting machines. I mentioned it a few months ago, and my goal at that time was to goad the big newspapers into looking at the story, with the idea that if there was any truth to it, the New York Times and Washington Post ought to be on the story. Well, now they are, especially the Times, which this week ran an op-ed piece by Paul Krugman that ought to make a lot of politicians very uncomfortable. Depending on whom you read, either computerized voting is being used to help American voters or to hurt them. The American Civil Liberties Union said in California that certain counties in the recent recall election were disenfranchised by not having touch screen voting, while other organizations suggest that touch screens were used to steal elections in Georgia. I don't know about any of this, but I do know about Information Technology, so I suggest we look at this issue in a way that nobody else seems to be -- as an IT problem." more at http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20031204.html

This is the follow up column the next week: "This is my follow-up to last week's column about the U.S. voting technology fiasco as an IT problem. We don't seem to do a very good job of running elections in this country. Our answer is to throw more technology at the problem, and last week, I suspected that our proposed solutions would just make the problems worse, not better. And I still feel that way, but this week, I have a solution to propose, and I promise you it isn't what you expect."
more at http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20031211.html