• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

Do You Trust Computer Voting Machines ?

Kane

Kane

DP Veteran
Joined
Feb 12, 2011
Messages
1,671
Reaction score
264
Gender
Undisclosed
Political Leaning
Liberal
Ya know , I still wonder if the elections are real after two fixed ones in 2000 and 2004.

Saying you trust computer voting is like saying you trust online poker or blackjack.

It takes an awful lot of faith.
 
What I dont understand is why they picked such an 'effing complicated implementation policy.

You can circumvent many problems by not having the machines networked together, only plugging them into a more central system to count the votes at the end of the night.

Equip each machine with a printer to give each voter a hard-copy receipt and a receipt pre and post count.
 
Electronic voting could very easily be made extremely secure. I'd advise spouting against "computer voting" unless you have the technical knowledge to actually understand what you are saying, however government procurement is so corrupt and incompetent that the odds of getting a good system aren't very high. The main benefit of a paper system is that it is very hard to screw it up even with idiots running the show.
 
I'm against it because technical error prevents people from voting, and it seems to happen in every election. Then these precincts are usually run by incompetent people who don't have paper ballots handy. Either that, or a couple of machines stay running and there is a line going around the neighbourhood of people waiting to vote, many of whom can't get in before the booths close.
 
No. Not because it is a machine, but because it is made by human hands that have political views. As we saw in 2004, with one major maker.. where the owner came out and said "we will make sure Bush wins"... That alone should have meant the machines should have been dumped.
 
Temporal said:
I'm against it because technical error prevents people from voting, and it seems to happen in every election. Then these precincts are usually run by incompetent people who don't have paper ballots handy. Either that, or a couple of machines stay running and there is a line going around the neighbourhood of people waiting to vote, many of whom can't get in before the booths close.
Click to expand...

Good points by all posters but the point about disrupting faith in political process seems highly relevant. When the outrage surfaced about these machines years ago, the facts were well documented and recently a U of M experiment on computer voting proved how easy the systems could be tampered with. It seems the pols should know that the faith on our system of govmnt should be restored and they should have responded in Congress by passing a national Federal election law banning computers. This cannot be left to the States, although many have responded favorably.
 
Last edited:
I don't trust electronic voting any less than I trust paper voting. Given the candidates our two major parties produce, it really matters very little who wins.
 
Direct capturing of votes on electronic media is fool hearty, there is no way you can secure the results.

There should be a machine that assists the voter in picking candidates/measures. When the voter has completed their choices, the machine would create a paper document which the voter can examine before the document is put in another machine for counting.
 
I only trust them as long as the results in the computer systems are not deemed to be the authortative results. Print the votes, and place them into a ballot box. If a recount is required or requested, the printed ballots should be counted, and be the authority on who has won.

So, I trust them when their results can be verified, and only then. No matter what other supposed safeguards are taken.
 
pbrauer said:
Direct capturing of votes on electronic media is fool hearty, there is no way you can secure the results.

There should be a machine that assists the voter in picking candidates/measures. When the voter has completed their choices, the machine would create a paper document which the voter can examine before the document is put in another machine for counting.
Click to expand...

Sounds about right. There has to be a paper trail at some level....


.
 
Kane said:
Ya know , I still wonder if the elections are real after two fixed ones in 2000 and 2004.

Saying you trust computer voting is like saying you trust online poker or blackjack.

It takes an awful lot of faith.
Click to expand...

Uhhh, the elections were not "fixed" in 2000 and 2004. :roll:


.
 
Hoplite said:
What I dont understand is why they picked such an 'effing complicated implementation policy.

You can circumvent many problems by not having the machines networked together, only plugging them into a more central system to count the votes at the end of the night.

Equip each machine with a printer to give each voter a hard-copy receipt and a receipt pre and post count.
Click to expand...

Disagree. It is too simp[le to program a chip to count a predetermined ratio of x versus y and then to unprogram itself and hide the changes whenever you tell it to - ie 5 minutes before quitting when the damage has been done.
 
Just a thought or two

voting_machines.png
 
Kane said:
Ya know , I still wonder if the elections are real after two fixed ones in 2000 and 2004.

Saying you trust computer voting is like saying you trust online poker or blackjack.

It takes an awful lot of faith.
Click to expand...

So why don't you explain to me how those elections were fixed? Please include sources.
 
Cole said:
Uhhh, the elections were not "fixed" in 2000 and 2004. :roll:
Click to expand...

Cut and paste the article sources into Google to find and read the stories.

Widespread Voter Fraud in 2004 Election

"The official vote count for the 2004 election showed that George W. Bush won by three million votes. But exit polls projected a victory margin of five to seven million votes for John Kerry. This ten-million-vote discrepancy is much greater than any possibility of error margin. The overall margin of error should statistically have been under one percent. But the official result deviated from the poll projections by more than five percent—a statistical impossibility. The discrepancy between the exit polls and the official count was considerably greater in the critical swing states.This exit poll data is a strong indicator of a corrupted election. But the case grows stronger if these exit poll discrepancies are interpreted in the context of more than 100,000 officially logged reports of irregularities and possible fraud during Election Day 2004."

Sources: In These Times, 02/15/05, “A Corrupted Election” by Steve Freeman and Josh Mitteldorf

No Paper Trail Left Behind: the theft of the 2004 Election, By Dennis Loo, In Censored 2006

Was the 2004 election Stolen? By Steven Freeman and Joel Bleifuss, 2006
 
Last edited:
Considering how we have no actual proof that the numbers we hear on the news aren't just made up, I don't really see how the machine we use to vote makes a difference. Rigging elections is easy. Cheating in an election is easy. And as earlier posters have said, it doesn't matter all that much who wins.

To the topic of the 2000 election, close to ten thousand Florida voters (most in highly Democrat-friendly districts) were barred from voting, on the basis that "they must be convicted felons, because they're black."
 
Electronic voting systems, evaluated at the behest of more than one state-level committee, have been remotely hacked as a demonstration of their insecurity. It has also been proven that some of the systems being used can be hacked with a magnet and a PDA.

Even were this not the case, there are electronic voting systems that are not designed to provide an adequate paper trail.

Any voting system which fails to provide an adequate mechanism for an independent audit is like having a jury trial where the jury box is sealed behind a polarized shield and accessible only by the judge -- you're relying on the fact that when the judge says he's going to talk to the jury he's actually doing so, and that when he reads the jury's verdict it is in fact the verdict rendered by the jury.

Our system of government was never designed to run on that level of trust -- quite the opposite, in fact.
 
Kind of curious why Diebold was caught editing its own Wikipedia entries ... to cover up crimes or proof of its unreliability?

"But the biggest culprit that the Scanner claims to have discovered is Diebold, a supplier of voting machines, which it says has made huge alterations to entries about its involvement in the controversial "hanging chad" election in the US in 2000. The company was criticised in the wake of the disputed results, but edits made by its employees on Wikipedia have included the removal of 15 paragraphs detailing the allegations."

Companies and party aides cast censorious eye over Wikipedia | Technology | The Guardian
 
WHy can't the US use paper ballots? Taiwan does, has over 80% turnout in elections and has the election results calculated and posted before everyone goes to bed...
 
ludahai said:
WHy can't the US use paper ballots? Taiwan does, has over 80% turnout in elections and has the election results calculated and posted before everyone goes to bed...
Click to expand...

Let's 23M people vs 300M people, I think it's a logistic issue. I doubt paper ballots are causing your 80% turnout.
 
Americans are victims of PR Propaganda

Don't let the PR firms and marketing moguls market that crappola to you. The tea party is a staged media circus for the people to swallow and does not constitute real change in government, just a sideshow. Real grass roots political groups don't use tens of millions of dollars like Scaife.

Look at the elites pitting the middle class against one another while they exploit you! Here is a list of Elites funding sites like NewsMax and WorldNetDaily:
among other things http://mediamattersaction.org/transparency/funders/

While the "Get Hillary" efforts are being largely run through such traditional VRWC outlets as the David Horowitz Freedom Center and its frontpagemagazine.com, NewsMax.com, and WorldNet Daily—all heavily bankrolled by the Mellon Scaife foundations—

 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom