No Kerry buttons allowed...

[Paul Burridge]

On Thu, 04 Nov 2004 01:03:55 GMT, "Clarence" <no@No.com> wrote:

"Tim Wescott" <tim@wescottnospamdesign.com> wrote in message
news:10oius8toh7924a@corp.supernews.com...
snip

Certainly voting machines that leave no paper trail is stupid. I was
listening to an interview of Jimmy Carter the other day; he mentioned
that were it to ask, the US would be turned down for monitoring by his
voting rights project, in part because of the lack of easy traceability.


Hey, that's good news!
No sane person wants Jimmy Carter within a thousand miles of an election.

He was the one who moved the inflation rate to over 14% and did so much harm
to this country we have yet to recover.

How did he "move the inflation rate to over 14%"? I thought you had an
independent central bank up and running in those days (as you have
today) which is free to set monetary policy as it sees fit to keep
inflation in check. Surely the then chairman of the Fed was to blame.
--

"What is now proved was once only imagin'd." - William Blake, 1793.

 

[Fred Bloggs]

Keith Williams wrote:

In article <slrncojs09.vq3.haude@kir.physnet.uni-hamburg.de>,
haude@kir.physnet.uni-hamburg.de says...

On Wed, 3 Nov 2004 12:13:22 -0500,
Keith Williams <krw@att.bizzzz> wrote
in Msg. <MPG.1bf2db988b614a67989777@news.individual.net

In article <3b3io01d12go7reub51kej773tcu6us8ja@4ax.com>,
speffSNIP@interlogDOTyou.knowwhat says...

I don't see the attraction of [voting] machines.

I do. They count fast and accurately.

And so do humans. I've done it a couple of times -- it doesn't take that
long, and it's fun as long you've got enough tea to drink and nice people
around you.


Of course our machines are
optical scanners, one per precinct. ...and there is a paper-trail.

That's sensible, if still superfluous. And I bet it's a lot more expensive
than just paying a bunch of volunteers $50 apiece.


I'll bet it's not. Counting ballots isn't trivial. Ours Tuesday was
three sheets of paper, four sides. There were likely seventy names in
more then a dozen races, plus two propositions. Some offices were pick
any 6 (state Senate) or pick any 15 (Justice of the Peace). It's not
simply a matter of counting two check-boxes. Counting is something
that machines are good at and people aren't (Florida '00).

I thought it was interesting that the voting in more sparsely populated
affluent neighborhoods went so smoothly compared to the inner city
precincts. I saw more people than ever in my precinct, about 50 when I
was there, there were about 15 voting machines for 3300 registered
voters, and the whole process did not take more than 10 minutes- in and
out the door. My precinct used the punch card ballot which you had to
insert in the ballot counting machine on the way out- so there was no
way to get out of there with an improperly punched ballot- because the
machine would kick it out and the workers would flag the problem for the
voter. But when you get to the inner city with much larger precinct
registration- tens of thousands, you were lucky to find two working
voting machines, a waiting line that stretched for several city blocks,
and a four hour waiting time.

 

[Rich Grise]

On Thu, 04 Nov 2004 08:56:05 -0800, Glenn Gundlach wrote:

Tim Wescott <tim@wescottnospamdesign.com> wrote in message news:<10oius8toh7924a@corp.supernews.com>...
Daniel Haude wrote:

Voting on Tuesdays is stupid, and voting on Tuesdays with voting machines
that leave no paper trail is even more stupid.

--Daniel

Certainly voting machines that leave no paper trail is stupid. I was
listening to an interview of Jimmy Carter the other day; he mentioned
that were it to ask, the US would be turned down for monitoring by his
voting rights project, in part because of the lack of easy traceability.

I was thinking about that last week. The old mechanical voting
machines didn't leave a paper trail either. BUT they were not capable
of doing a random change or count backwards like a computer can. I'm
not saying its happening, but if it did, how would we know? For the
mechanical unit to reach 1000 votes, it had to be tripped 999 times
before.

When I was in high school, they brought in one of those old-time voting
booths. It has a big control lever, and a panel full of little levers
that you click over to cast a vote. You pull the big lever, it closes
the curtain and resets the machine. You do your vote with the little
levers, and when you're done, you pull the big lever back, and it
simultaneously punches _all_ of your votes onto a paper ballot. It
must have been a mechanical nightmare.

But it _did_ make paper ballots, which could be human- or machine-
counted.

Cheers!
Rich