Text 13536, 45 rader
Skriven 2006-10-28 12:01:18 av John Beckett (1:379/45)
  Kommentar till text 13525 av Gary Britt (1:379/45)
Ärende: Re: How to steal an election by hacking the vote
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From: John Beckett <FirstnameSurname@compuserve.com.omit>

"Gary Britt" <glb@gencog.com> wrote in message news:<4542242d@w3.nls.net>:
> Elections are stolen when paper ballots are used also.

Someone please explain how intelligent people can oppose wanting a reasonable
voting system? I don't believe the conspiracy theories about how Diebold plan
to rig the votes so Republicans will win, so what is it?

Of course 10 people could get together and plan a swindle whereby they cheat
with paper ballots. And they might get away with it for a few years. And they
might make a tiny influence on the outcome (and on rare occasions, a
significant influence). But there is no way 10 or 100 or even 10,000 people in
a conspiracy could really control a paper-based election in an undetected way.

With electronic elections, ONE programmer could conceivably rig the whole
thing. Sure, it would be hard to pull off in practice, and exit polls might
give suspicions. But it would be so easy for a programmer to throw a
significant but essentially undetectable bias into the votes.

Diebold have come up with a STUPID way of voting. It is absolutely impossible
to even think it is safe from tampering (or are we still in the days when
people would believe anything printed by a computer?).

Of course the voting machine should print out a paper ticket. The voter should
put that ticket in a ballot box, just as if it were a paper vote. There should
be a check by counting tickets and comparing them with the machine count, in
randomly-selected areas.

Probably the original reasons for opposing the obvious audit trail are:

- Expense (real motivation is to save money, not time).

- Trouble with non-working printers etc (not a problem in practice because
it wouldn't matter if even 10% of printers did not work on the day).

- Diebold doesn't want a check of its accuracy because they know that any
complex system will get slight differences from reality, and then they would
have to spend weeks explaining to illiterates how an occasional trivial error
is just one of those things.

John

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