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Voting Security Issues Plague Maryland

No matter who wins today in Maryland, election advocates vow to keep fighting for verifiable, paper receipts.

By Andrew Ramsey-Moor

Critics of electronic voting will be watching Maryland closely today to see how Diebold’s electronic voting machines perform. But no matter who wins the elections, and regardless of whether the state’s $106 million touchscreen, paperless voting system performs better today than it did during the problem-plagued September 12 primary, advocates in Maryland of honest, verifiable elections plan to redouble their… return to article

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    The Dems may have “thumped” the Reps, but whoever won the Nov 7 election and whoever will win any future election, it doesn’t change the drawbacks to computerized voting machines. Their inherent weaknesses and the risks of their use haven’t evaporated in the week-and-a-half since the midterms.

    Print the ballots, slow down the vote-counts to favor accuracy over speed of reporting, and invite representatives from all contesting parties as well as other non-partisan observers to the counts. If there’s a close result or a reason to suspect erroneous results, do it over. The people and the networks can wait, and should expect to.

    The emphasis should be on getting as close to a dead-on talley of all voters’ choices as is humanly possible. NOT on convenience, speed, or even cost. A ballot is not a factor of production, and an election’s “bottom line” is not efficiency, it is accuracy combined with transparency.

    Who really gives a damn which party is “ahead” if you can’t say with confidence that the election is demonstrably fair, open to scrutiny, and unsuspicious with regards to the outcome? Any citizen, representative, judge, or losing candidate should be able to say “Show me!” and get clear, unequivocal data whose collection and quantification can be verified even by observers who are political enemies with each other, i.e. that they all accept the veracity of the outcome whether they’re happy with it or not.

    I am glad to see the muting of Rep Party dominance, but this particular issue is not dead simply because of Dem Party gains. It will continue to be an issue in 2008 and beyond, regardless of who wins office that year.

    Philippines Posted by Kuya on Nov 16, 2006 at 2:39 AM
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