RE: DC Article: "Larimer Shows Up Boulder"

[paul.tiger@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

I beg to differ. The 'force' comes in the way of federal law. We cannot ask our clerk and staff to violate the federal laws concening these issues. The best that we can do is to rid ourselves and them of these laws. I've recently heard Josh ask for help in lobbying our state legislators to gain relief from idiotic laws that cannot be enforced because there's been no funding to do so. We know of these things as 'unfunded mandates'. Funded or unfunded, they are still against the law. The law requires the use of computers in voting.

 

Beating up the elections division changes nothing. I fully suspect that you will beat up Hillary as soon as she takes office, because it is what you know how to do. Take a chill pill and change gears. How about a novel idea, like working for a better government, than working against everything and everyone? Good changes can happen, if we use all the energy for good. Believe in evil, live to fight evil, and then all is evil, because that is all we can see.

 

paul tiger

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: RE: DC Article: "Larimer Shows Up Boulder"
From: Evan Daniel Ravitz <evan@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, November 09, 2006 4:03 pm
To: Paul Tiger <paul.tiger@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: "Liss, Josh" <jliss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, CVV Voting
<cvv-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Hillary Hall <hillary@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Nobody can possibly know if "Boulder may have had some of the most
accurate elections..." because the software is proprietary.

Nobody is "forced to use a modicum of computer equipment" for
elections. Elections officials WILL spend any ammount to pass the buck
on to the private sector, blatant security flaws and conflicts of
poltical interest be damned.

Elections were (and still are in most of the developed world) cheaper,
more accurate, publicly conducted and often faster when hand counted.

Humans can easily deal with power outages, yes-no transpositions in
printing, paper shrinkage and any number of other things which have
paralyzed elections here.

Evan


On Thu, 9 Nov 2006, Paul Tiger wrote:

> Quick is not the issue. Accuracy is. Boulder may have had some of the most
> accurate elections of any county in this state (maybe other places too), and
> also the slowest. There have absolutely been problems, and most of them have
> been noted by the humans. Some haven't been fixed yet, but they've been
> acknowledged. Things go slowly as the electronic systems actually force them
> to be slower. Procedurally most things are being dealt with, except
> catastrophic failures. And there have been those and probably we will see
> more of those.
>
> We are forced to use a modicum of computer equipment. I believe that we
> should choose wisely and not invest in more systems that we might rely on,
> for they will fail. I repeat - they will fail. We just don't know when they
> will fail, but in a true Murphyism we can be certain that computer systems
> (all systems) will fail when the heaviest load is placed on them. AKA when
> we need them most is when they will go to hell in a handbasket.
>
> What we lack is failure analysis, largely because it is difficult to test
> election systems outside of an actual election. Mock elections provide mock
> results.
> There are ways of testing Mean Time Between Failure, only Boulder is not
> doing that. Not just Boulder, but no one is doing that. If elections
> equipment vendors have MTBF specs, it is on hardware that we couldn't care
> about or could easily be replaced in a matter of minutes. Component parts
> have MTBF specs, but not the integrated systems.
>
> Paul Tiger
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joe Pezzillo [mailto:jpezzillo@xxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Thursday, November 09, 2006 1:50 PM
> To: Liss, Josh
> Cc: CVV Voting; Hillary Hall
> Subject: Re: DC Article: "Larimer Shows Up Boulder"
>
>
> What do you mean? I live here and I've been involved in this issue
> for several years. I might even be willing to help out if I didn't
> have to fear getting investigated by the Sheriff should I happen to
> ask any tough questions. -Joe
>
>
>