"Hold Up on E-voting" by Howard Dean

[GreenPartyVoter]

"In December 2000, five Supreme Court justices concluded that a recount in the state of Florida's presidential election was unwarranted. This, despite the desire of the Florida Supreme Court to order a statewide recount in an election that was decided by only 537 votes. In the face of well-documented voting irregularities throughout the state, the U.S. Supreme Court's decision created enormous cynicism about whether the votes of every American would actually be counted. Although we cannot change what happened in Florida, we have a responsibility to our democracy to prevent a similar situation from happening again.

Some politicians believe a solution to this problem can be found in electronic voting. Recently, the federal government passed legislation encouraging the use of "touch screen" voting machines, even though they fail to provide a verifiable record that can be used in a recount. Furthermore, this equipment cannot even verify whether a voter did indeed cast a ballot for his or her intended candidate. Unfortunately, this November, as many as 28 percent of Americans — 50 million people — will cast ballots using machines that could produce such unreliable and unverifiable results.

Only since 2000 have touch-screen voting machines become widely used, yet they already have caused widespread controversy due to their unreliability. For instance, in Wake County, N.C., in 2002, 436 votes were lost as a result of bad software. Hinds County, Miss., had to rerun an election because the machines had so many problems that the will of the voters could not be determined. According to local election officials in Fairfax County, Va., a recent election resulted in one in 100 votes being lost. Many states, such as New Hampshire and most recently, Maine, have banned paperless touch-screen voting and many more are considering doing so.

Without any accountability or transparency, even if these machines work, we cannot check whether they are in fact working reliably. The American public should not tolerate the use of paperless e-voting machines until at least the 2006 election, allowing time to prevent ongoing errors and failures with the technology. One way or another, every voter should be able to check that an accurate paper record has been made of their vote before it is recorded."

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0603-05.htm

[aldian159]

1. nice article

good for you, Dr. Dean.

[John_H]

2. Great piece--foceful without being overly alarmist. Dean understands

that overstating the BBV threat works against our interests. People convinced their votes don't have a chance in hell getting counted won't bother to vote.

The real solution is for people to act for change and get more people to vote than ever---the more Dems that vote the harder Diebold and friends have to work to throw it to the rethugs.

[Wonk]

3. kick