THERE's a bill - HR-811 - purporting to reform the numerous problems
that have arisen with electronic touch screen voting devices - called
DREs - which sounds good until you consider one thing: the touch screen
devices don't work properly and if they were a car, you wouldn't be
allowed to drive one.
This has been known to at least some since the mid-1980s but the voting
machine lobby successfully conned Congress, states and localities into
buying into their proprietary toys. Now Congress is being roped into
continued use of these malfunctioning devices.
The problem with HR 811 is that it's not the government's job to find a
way to make them work. The answer is to stop using them, as John Gideon
points out in Brad Blog:
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Some HR-811 proponents state that while DREs may be bad we have them now
and we need to fix what we have. My problem with this thinking is that
we are talking about elections; not a line of computers. Think about
those things you know about for a minute. If your university purchased a
specialized computer that failed as much as DREs do; would your
university keep it and try to fix it for the future or would you send it
back and go somewhere else? If you used an online legal library that was
missing references; would you keep using that library or pay the money
to change to another one? I know that when I was doing nuclear refueling
on Naval ships if I had a tool that failed constantly, use of that tool
would be stopped immediately and something else would be designed for
use.
The big issue is that the special computer would never have gone on the
market; the reference library would never have gone online; and the tool
would never have been sold to the Navy. Industry does not work that way.
Why is it that our elections are not as important as our work?
Why is it that it's alright to allow a technology that has constantly
failed to continue to be used? And why is it that we can continue to use
it while trying to fix the problems? How many votes are to be lost,
flipped, or not counted while we continue to allow the use of the
machines that are responsible for the loss, flipping and not counting?
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http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4298#more-4298
that have arisen with electronic touch screen voting devices - called
DREs - which sounds good until you consider one thing: the touch screen
devices don't work properly and if they were a car, you wouldn't be
allowed to drive one.
This has been known to at least some since the mid-1980s but the voting
machine lobby successfully conned Congress, states and localities into
buying into their proprietary toys. Now Congress is being roped into
continued use of these malfunctioning devices.
The problem with HR 811 is that it's not the government's job to find a
way to make them work. The answer is to stop using them, as John Gideon
points out in Brad Blog:
|||||
Some HR-811 proponents state that while DREs may be bad we have them now
and we need to fix what we have. My problem with this thinking is that
we are talking about elections; not a line of computers. Think about
those things you know about for a minute. If your university purchased a
specialized computer that failed as much as DREs do; would your
university keep it and try to fix it for the future or would you send it
back and go somewhere else? If you used an online legal library that was
missing references; would you keep using that library or pay the money
to change to another one? I know that when I was doing nuclear refueling
on Naval ships if I had a tool that failed constantly, use of that tool
would be stopped immediately and something else would be designed for
use.
The big issue is that the special computer would never have gone on the
market; the reference library would never have gone online; and the tool
would never have been sold to the Navy. Industry does not work that way.
Why is it that our elections are not as important as our work?
Why is it that it's alright to allow a technology that has constantly
failed to continue to be used? And why is it that we can continue to use
it while trying to fix the problems? How many votes are to be lost,
flipped, or not counted while we continue to allow the use of the
machines that are responsible for the loss, flipping and not counting?
||||
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4298#more-4298
1 comment:
Just as bad are the optical scanners, used for vote by mail in WA state, because they have secret software counts (literally NO ONE knows the truth) on the first count which is essentially the only count that matters. In a disputed or corrupted election, the recounts or "audits" are usually stalled, frustrated or charged for at exorbitant prices. Democracy has to get it right the first time, or like Bush v Gore a court may say time's up! (Doesn't matter whether or not Bush is your man, the election process is terminated at that point, no finished recount is allowed)
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