clearly, the ability and will to manipulate vote tallies has been a goal (and requirement) of the Bush Admin and GOP in general. Bush, in his life, has been known to all as a guy willing to bend or change the rules so he can "win". That characteristic was/is perfectly suited to presiding over vote manipulation schemes. A match made in...well, not heaven.

Posted by T22 at December 18, 2007 06:29 AM

too early to type good.

Posted by T2 at December 18, 2007 06:30 AM

Ohio says industry supplied voting machines are vulnerable, again. Other TLC threads have asked, sort of, "Is Congress Inept?".

Case history: Summer 2003 I and others proposed an open source Linux based voting system and tried to get $50,000 funding for a six month prototype effort. The list of advantages is lengthy. Instead of blathering on about it here I slapped it into a page Hava systems

Most of the e.voting problems would have not occurred from the get go. Billions would have been saved.

Why didn't it happen? In spite of the proposers having dozens of years of application experience, awards from international software trade mags, and the core techniques demonstrable, they were unknown to and did not donate to Representative Bill Delahunt and some other Reps. and Sens. (that will go unnamed as friends work for them). That's not a big surprise.

The summary of the Ohio report condemns Congress as at least inept. They attribute the voting system mess to:

1. the unrealistic expectations of the tide of change following the 2000 presidential election seeking quick solutions for better, more reliable voting systems when the underbelly of the punch card election system was exposed in a close presidential popular vote,
2. the opportunities presented by this tide of change for voting machine companies to sell mass quantities of voting machines to state governments all over the nation, resulting in less than optimum research and design of the security of computer software and system configurations,
3. the failure of Congress and/or its newly established regulatory agency, the Election Assistance Commission, to recognize that computer-based voting, heavily marketed as a panacea, should be subject to stringent security testing to ensure it meets computer security industry standards, and
4. the failure of Congress to fully fund the Help America Vote Act by approximately $800 million dollars to provide for adequate funding of the Election Assistance Commission and for training and other implementation solutions for the states.

In short Congress took unwise actions, under funded the efforts, ignored sounder technologies not from industry but from people who were not in a position to donate to campaign funds.

Inept is too kind. Way too kind. Democracy Now says crooked.

Like improving elections by replacing our obsolete voting system. How obsolete? I like the history from Wikipedia on voting systems which notes,

• A variety of methods were proposed by statesmen such as Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and Daniel Webster. Some of the apportionment methods discovered in the United States were rediscovered in Europe in the 19th century,…
• Ramon Llull discovered both the Borda count and a pairwise method that satisfied the Condorcet criterion in the 13th century.

How obsolete? Three to eight centuries or so.

ROTFL

Posted by jaynicks at December 18, 2007 10:14 AM

Please let's not pretend to be confused about the motivations of the "Democrat" Leadership in Congress. There is zero possibility that they are simply that naive, stupid or clueless.

Call a spade a shovel and call MOST politician corrupt. You will be correct.

Thank you.

Posted by DeminNewJ at December 18, 2007 11:12 AM

re: North American Union. Afta' NAFTA?

A friend sent:
"I would be curious as to anyone's thoughts on this one...please check it out..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuBo4E77ZXo

"

Comments anyone?

Posted by jaynicks at December 18, 2007 12:33 PM

Seems there's also a problem in Colorado with their ES&S systems, both paper-based optical scan and the DRE's; and Sequoia Voting Systems DRE's; and Hart Intercivic's paper-based optical scan, all were completely decertified for use. Sequoia's optical scan and Hart's DRE were given a conditional cert. Seems we need to go back to punch cards or paper, their error rates were far less than any of these.

Posted by peter at December 18, 2007 01:55 PM

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