[ale] OT--- The voting issues

H. Bieber habieb at myrealbox.com
Tue Nov 5 22:36:02 EST 2002


You guys have got to be kidding me about the deselecting and reselecting. Did you RTFM? I work at one of the polls in Gwinnett (and no I am not Democrat.. I am a big "L" person) There were 70 year old ladies that can't even operate a microwave that figured out how to do it. You every once in a while have to realize the rest of the world is not as technically astute as most of the people on this list, there are many that would fat finger the wrong person if there wasn't a "deselect". 

How do you know your vote counted with the Accuvote machines? They just scanned the ballot as it entered the machine, if it misread or didn't even read the ballot, too bad, it was in the bin with the rest of them. And since it is an anonymous system how would you choose your ballot out of a box of 600+?

I talked to a tech from Diebold about the software. They know that since it is Windoze it is unsecure, and unstable. The security (if you want to call it that) is that (A)It is hard to get your hands on one of the voting cards with the encoder. (B)Even if you did get one and get it encoded, you would have to break into the kernel with it by somehow rebooting the machine or making the machine read a program that it is not looking to read, with all that if you got in finally and registered 1000000 votes for Joe Schmoe (L) when the close out procedures are performed (which is before transmitting results) the poll manager would see it, and that machine would be pulled and audited by Diebold. and (C)You would have to be at the machine for a long time. We were averaging 4-8 minutes per voter.

I am not saying this is a perfect system, it is ALOT better and more accurate then what we had. There will be improvements and changes made, this is the first election with these machines. Don't be so hell bent on the speed, look for better accuracy. It could be alot faster if we only had one choice to make.. ie The Iraqi Election..
President   Sadam or (if you check or you will be executed)

thanks
Harold


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