RE: Can we consense on hand-counting for 2004?

["Pete Klammer" <pklammer@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

That could be an interesting academic exercise, but I haven't heard it lead
to anything practical yet.  The fruits of such arguments I've heard of so
far sound like:

"tangible, physical artifact, which may or may not be a piece of paper"

"indelible directly-human-actuated recording, which may or may not be pencil
or ink on paper"

"directly human-readable without technological intervention, which may or
may not be marks on paper"

"unambiguous and incontrovertible transformation from human intentional
gestures to reportable tallies or counts, which may or may not be scanning
of paper"

etc., etc., etc.  Sort of denial that paper is the best-suited we know of so
far, postulating a hypothetical future medium without offering an example.

--
Pete Klammer / ACM(1970), IEEE, ICCP(CCP), NSPE(PE), NACSE(NSNE)
    3200 Routt Street / Wheat Ridge, Colorado 80033-5452
  (303)233-9485 / Fax:(303)274-6182 / Mailto:PKlammer@xxxxxxx
 Idealism may not win every contest, but that's not what I choose it for!


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nicholas Bernstein [mailto:nicholas.bernstein@xxxxxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: Thursday, March 04, 2004 10:12 AM
> To: pklammer@xxxxxxx
> Cc: AlKolwicz@xxxxxxxxx; 'Evan Daniel Ravitz'; 'Citizens for 
> Verifiable Voting'; 'CVV Steering Committee'
> Subject: Re: Can we consense on hand-counting for 2004?
> 
> 
> Seems to me that Pete and Al are finally understanding what a 
> PITA paper 
> ballots really are.
> If you want to talk about improvements in security, reliability, and 
> accountability you have to open yourselves up to the 
> possiblity that a 
> DRE system might be able to outperform paper.
> 
> Instead what I hear so much from this group is, "We don't trust 
> computers. Paper ballots are the way to go!...now lets find a way to 
> make paper solve all of these difficulties we see." I'd rather have a 
> little academic honesty. If we're into dreaming up a better 
> mousetrap, 
> let's get our system requirements out on the table, enumerate and 
> prioritize them, and then rank each system we see (along with 
> non-existant hypothetical systems) acccording to the metrics 
> defined by 
> the requirements.
> 
> Nick
> 
> 
>