Re: Wait just a friggin' minute!

[tom bldr <tom_bldr@xxxxxxxxx>]

I'm not holding my breath for it to happen-- as the
VVPT movement seems hell bent on fixing the DRE
problem. I remain a KISS advocate, but the DRE/VVPT
movement is merely the closest advocacy group to my
core KISS standard.

I sent these to the group ~2 months ago, but for my
money, these are the best articles on the matter, by
PBS' Robert X. Cringely:

Part 1:   
DECEMBER 4, 2003
No Confidence Vote:
Why the Current Touch Screen Voting Fiasco Was Pretty
Much Inevitable
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20031204.html

Part 2:
DECEMBER 11, 2003
Follow the Money:
Why the Best Voting Technology May Be No Technology at
All
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20031211.html

Excerpt from Part 2:

"My model for smart voting is Canada.  The Canadians
are watching our election problems and laughing their
butts off.  They think we are crazy, and they are
right.

Forget touch screens and electronic voting. In
Canadian Federal elections, two barely-paid
representatives of each party, known as "scrutineers,"
are present all day at the voting place.  If there are
more political parties, there are more scrutineers. 
To vote, you write an "X" with a pencil in a one
centimeter circle beside the candidate's name, fold
the ballot up and stuff it into a box.  Later, the
scrutineers AND ANY VOTER WHO WANTS TO WATCH all sit
at a table for about half an hour and count every
ballot, keeping a tally for each candidate.  If the
counts agree at the end of the process, the results
are phoned-in and everyone goes home.  If they don't,
you do it again.  Fairness is achieved by balanced
self-interest, not by technology.  The population of
Canada is about the same as California, so the
elections are of comparable scale.  In the last
Canadian Federal election the entire vote was counted
in four hours.  Why does it take us 30 days or more?

The 2002-2003 budget for Elections Canada is just over
$57 million U.S. dollars, or $1.81 per Canadian
citizen.  It is extremely hard to get an equivalent
per-citizen figure for U.S. elections, but trust me,
it is a LOT higher.  This week, San Francisco held a
runoff mayoral election that cost $2.5 million, or
$3.27 per citizen of the city.  And this was for just
one election, not a whole year of them.

We are spending $3.9 billion or $10 per citizen for
new voting machines.  Canada just prints ballots.

No voting system is perfect.  Elections have been
stolen and voters disenfranchised with paper ballots,
too.  But our approach of throwing technology at a
problem with a result that election reliability is not
improved, that it may well be compromised in new and
even scarier ways, and that this all costs billions
that could be put to better use makes no sense at all."

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