Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/07/18/election-systems-and-software.html
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Computerized, auditless voting machines are a direct assault on democracy.
The whole point of using machines is to have less citizen involvement, and from that initial broken premise we’ve moved on to systems that cannot be validated or trusted by design.
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“I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president [Bush].”
– Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell
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I suspect those are illegal copies.
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I would still take either Bush over the monkey factory we have now.
(edit) Maybe it’s just nostalgia and I’ve forgotten how horrible it was, but… I don’t think so…
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All automated voting systems should be outlawed, IMO. Maybe, just maybe, you could build one on a Blockchain platform that could be trusted, but I don’t think any electronic system so far has beaten paper for auditability.
Also, I seem to have made BBS Captain, lol. Sweet.
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In Canada it’s a simple piece of paper that you pencil in your vote, like a school test. They then feed the paper through a computer that instantly tallys it and puts the voting slip into a lockbox. You are left with a paper-trail and instant counts. Why doesn’t America do this?
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I’m holding some judgement in reserve just to see if Trump gets us into another stupid war. Iraq and Afghanistan were disasters but they were Bolton’s brainchilds Bolton is ready to finish what he started and con Trump into invading Iran. That has the potential to have greater knock on effects than the Iraq War’s Syrian refugee crisis which has really pushed some countries far into authoritarian territory.
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My New York district does, at least. As I understand it, the voting methodology, voter roll protocols and record keeping are largely left to the states. We definitely should have federally-mandated parity and accountability, but I’d bet dollars to donughts that the red states would lose their minds at the proposal. Just like the electoral college, this type of meddling are the only reasons they attain hegemony. As people here at BB are fond of pointing out, reality has a well-known progressive bias. The regressive elements are well aware of this fact.
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Trump is truly horrible but the Iraq War was an unbelievable crime that has been whitewashed and forgotten already to my utter disbelief.
We literally decimated the Iraqi population - Trump may be maliciously imprisoning asylum seeking families and children but Bush destroyed families, permanently, on a far larger scale.
But it’s not really a contest, if so, we all lose. And Trump might still make his own war when it comes time for re-election to insist you have to re-elect a wartime president.
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Aha, sounds like you need a quick reminder. Let me see, a financial apocalypse that destroyed the life savings of millions of Americans? Oh, how about the the lies to congress and the American people culminating in a preemptive war in Iraq? According to figures from The Lancet, that one resulted the violent deaths of over 600,000 men, women and children. Then there’s Abu Ghraib torture. Extraordinary rendition. The ATF gunwalking scandal. Free speech zones. The Katrina debacle. NSA warrantless surveillance. VA medical care scandals. Water boarding. The list goes on.
At least the current administration seems to be incompetent-evil.
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Because that would make it harder to covertly alter the vote counts. Duh!?!?
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It really seems like this was flat out designed to facilitate voter fraud. Safe bet that the “select customers” are certain warm- coloured states.
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Sometimes the old ways are the best ways: http://objectofhistory.org/objects/show/votingmachine/46
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So…
Treason?
That concept really needs to be explored on many fronts.
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Go Senator Wyden!
Asks the probing questions, doesn’t take shit from anybody!
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I remember Ralph Nader calling that, “The Evil of two lessers”. Those were fun times, huh?
I feel like I commented on this some story back in my slashdot days.
Speaking of which, I think I still have a copy of the “source code” for a turn of the century GEMS system around here somewhere…
Because the right wing does not believe in democracy, they believe in fascism. Amerika lurches further and further into fascism by the day. Insecure, vulnerable e-voting machines have been our bane for how many election cycles now? And not a got damned thing has been done to alleviate an obviously fixable problem. Why? Because the right wing does not believe in democracy, they believe in fascism… rinse and repeat.
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