Vote for Paper

[selenite0]

Venezuela had an election using electronic voting machines that printed out a paper copy to be verified and put in a lockbox. How did it work?

In the town of Valle de la Pascua, where papers were counted at the initiative of those manning the voting center, the Yes vote had been cut by more than 75 percent, and the entire voting material was seized by the national guard shortly after the difference was established.

Three machines in a voting center in the state of Bolivar that has generally voted against Chávez all showed the same 133 votes for the Yes option, and higher numbers for the No option. Two other machines registered 126 Yes votes and much higher votes for the No. The opposition alleges that these machines, which can both send and receive information, were reprogrammed to start adjudicating all votes to the No option after a given number of Yes votes has been registered.

Okay, can we stick with paper?

Comments

[icequeen-tpz.livejournal.com]

No kidding!

[patgund.livejournal.com]

Sounds good to me.

[aeddie.livejournal.com]

Not that I want electronic voting. But do they have proof of tampering or are they just bitching. Granted with all the machines having the same number of yes votes is suspicious, but proof please.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

"Proof"? Well, they've got eyewitnesses claiming proof was confiscated by that Nat'l Guard. And protestors against the election are getting killed:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110005494

So I'm seeing a big tangled mess and I'm hoping we can avoid one of our own. Possibly a forlorn hope.

Powered by Microsoft

[abovenyquist.livejournal.com]

Did anyone notes that the Diabold voting machine in the last election here were running WINDOWS?

Seriously, the potential holes in such a system are astonishing. I want a physical paper trail of some sort somewhere.

I think we're headed for an election chaos debacle which will make the Florida 2000 business look like a minor blip.

Re: Powered by Microsoft

[nminusone.livejournal.com]

I don't think there will be a debacle. There won't be any evidence of a debacle, because there's no paper or other trail. So whoever won will just say the media is being paranoid and spouting conspiracy theories, and they'll shut up to avoid sounding like nuts. After all, there won't be any hard evidence of cheating, right? Somehow, somewhere along the way the standard of proof went from "You have to prove your election was fair and accurate" to "Unless you can give ironclad proof of large-scale tampering, eeh, it was close enough to fair, who cares?". Seems to me there have been enough suspicious irregularities lately, in various places, but on the national level, seems to care too much. If people understood auditing, they'd know that when you find anything iffy, you expand your search even more. But it doesn't seem to be happening that way.