voting machine tampering

Posted by Michael Gizzi-2 on Nov 07, 2006; 12:48am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/voting-machine-tampering-tp522939p522949.html

I was impressed that when I voted on Friday (Colorado has early voting),
that the touch screen was attached to a printer that printed out each of my
responses.  This was not present when voting in 2004; sure... its still
possible to mess with the system, but the print out provides a bit more
confidence on the part of the voter.

Michael Gizzi

On 11/6/06, Robert Holmes <robert at holmesacosta.com> wrote:

>
> The NY Times op-ed piece by Conley that Paul references above also makes
> the point that counting is a statistical process. Unfortunately this is a
> red herring - yes it's an effect but it is swamped by the other systemic
> abuses. Here's a paragraph from a Rolling Stone piece (
> http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen
> ):
>
> The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground
> > state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there
> > purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to
> > process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives,
> > shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and
> > illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A
> > precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly
> > high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city
> > Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In
> > Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist
> > threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.
> >
>
> These are not statistical anomalies; these are not analogous to the errors
> in counting Conley's "pennies in a jar". These are bad people doing bad
> things and getting away with it.
>
> Robert
>
>
> On 11/6/06, Owen Densmore <owen at backspaces.net> wrote:
> >
> > The Freakonomics guys said at one time that we need to be clear about
> > the natural errors within any system, and when the vote is closer
> > than that error value, decide on what to do about a "tie" rather than
> > fretting about chads, hackers, broken machines and so on.
> >
> > Basically voting like any other process is imperfect and trying to
> > make it more accurate will never chase all the error out.
> >
> > That said, statistically interesting systematic errors should be
> > revealing, I think.
> >
> >      -- Owen
> >
> > Owen Densmore   http://backspaces.net
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ============================================================
> > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
> >
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20061106/ef9a0e1c/attachment.html