And so the pointless exercise of voting by machine continues...

You might say that this website was born because of election irregularites - it was Bush vs. Gore in 2000 which intially prompted us to create DU. Although I'm not an election expert (unlike many of the people who visit DU and in particular the Election Reform forum) I'm continually stunned by the rapid growth in electronic voting and the problems that come with it. Even leaving aside the allegations of outright fraud - and there is plenty of evidence to support those allegations - the idea of putting something so important into the hands of such unreliable technology just seems plain stupid to me. It seems that almost every election now comes with reports of machines breaking down or screwing up.

I thought I'd recount (no pun intended) my experiences with voting in the UK. I moved to the US in 1998, so the last time I voted in a UK election was 1997 and things may have changed since then, but this is what it was like the last time I voted there.

The local council sends voter registration forms to every home in your area, so if you are not registered to vote you just fill it out and send it in. On election day you go to your assigned polling place, give the staff your name and address, and they check you against the electoral register. They give you a ballot containing the names of the candidates which you take into a private voting booth. Using a pen, you mark an X next to the candidate name of your choice. (If you write anything other than a single X on the ballot, the ballot is considered "spoiled" and will not be counted.) Then you fold the ballot, leave the booth, and place the ballot into a locked box via a slot in the top.

After the polls close, the ballot boxes are taken to the counting location, unlocked, and the ballots are publicly hand-counted by election officers. If the vote is close enough (depending on the rules put in place by the local registration office) there will be a recount, again by hand.

When I read the reports this morning of the irregularites in Chicago, I was again stunned - not because I didn't expect irregularities, but because these people seem to think that that dead horse they're flogging is about to jump up and start running around. Here's a snip:



They're waiting for the machines to fix themselves? Good grief. Here's an idea - why not just take the ballots straight downtown and count them by hand in the first place? That way you can cut out the expensive, shoddy, inconsistent machines altogether.

But of course, just like all aspects of life and politics these days there's big business involved, and somebody somewhere is paying good money to make sure that those machines stay exactly where they are.

And a toast to all the contributors to the Election Reform forum.


:toast:

...but more likely is the case, as Britain's big corporate players become more influential and well entrenched in UK politics, they will model our crooked electoral process. I'd guess Diebold's already knocking at their door.

the idea of putting something so important into the hands of such unreliable technology just seems plain stupid to me. It seems that almost every election now comes with reports of machines breaking down or screwing up.

How "unreliable" is your computer? It's the same technology (or same enough). It's not the technology that's unreliable, what's happening is that the underlying crudely written software -- software which is intende to skew the results -- is escaping into public notice via "glitches," etc.

Machines which overwhelmingly (like 99.9999%) make errors in one direction only (as almost ALL of the errors in the 2004 election went in Bush's favor, not Kerry's) can't IMO be considered "unreliable" technology-wise. It's just poorly written software -- and thank God for it, else we'd never know what is going on in the bowels of those machines to rob us of our democracy.