One thing people here often overlook

Posted Sep 1, 2004 18:12 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307)
In reply to: One thing people here often overlook by AJWM
Parent article: Back door in Diebold voting systems?

My point is exactly that no, you have to trust a lot of people. In the case of a recount, you have to trust the place where the votes were stored. You have to trust the seals in the ballot boxes, before and after the first counting. You have to trust people who transport ballot boxes. You have to trust the maker of the seals not to make seals in excess.

The snafu of the last USofA presidential elections was mainly due to the following factors:

* lack of accountability. each wrongly counted vote should be laid havily on someone's back: the election fraud that took place was a perfect crime.

* lack of a national voter database. this has privacy issues, ok. but a lot of countries (including mine) do well with national ids. get over it.

* absentee voting. here this is absolutely forbidden. either you vote where you registered or not. period. it gives a lot of space for fraud.

* bipartidarism. for any ballot box here, there are 40-50 people looking at it until the moment the sum (electronic or not) comes out of it. this is because for any ballot box, there are at least five to ten political parties involved.

* bad electronic media. our media outlets (electronic or paper) discovered they had a lot of power when they could immediately count, add, and accompany the results of the election.

* nonsense timezone managemnt. I don't recall if there are 4 or 5 timezones in the US. in Brasil, there are four -- and all the voting booths open at the same time: the hour of opening is adjusted in each timezone so all things start and end at the same time.

* fear of economic uncertainty. NYSE drops a few points, even Gore gave up: ok, Bush takes it all. I don't care.