Friday, October 24, 2008

The Give and Take of Voting Machines in America

The SciFi Channel's website dedicated to technology, DVICE, has a made that demonstrates the give and take of voting machines in the United States. The interactive maps show potential for hacking and potential for error. The maps show the scale between paper ballots to complete digital voting. Digital voting has almost zero error but the lack of a paper trail opens it up to easy hacking with little evidence. On the other hand paper ballots cannot be hacked but as Florida in 2000 demonstrated, chads happen.

When your done looking at your state's information be sure to check out DVICE's breakdown of the different types of voting machines.

Do not worry if the maps create doubt in your mind about the state of the democratic system. To worry at this stage implies all those votes are legitimate.


Adrian said...

Do you understand the difference between voter fraud and voter registration fraud? It's one thing to register Tony Romo in five states, it's another thing for Tony Romo to show up on election day and vote. The voter registration fraud victimized not just the state but also ACORN itself which doesn't want to volunteers who sit at home filling out bogus registrations. That is why ACORN reported it to the state govt's. In many states ACORN is required to turn in all registrations they get (so they can't throw out GOP ones claiming they thought they were bogus), thus they submit them in a bag labeled "registrations we think are bogus".

Check out this TPM piece on ACORN as an antidote to Pajamas Media.

Catholicgauzette said...

Ha, I told you New York’s were the ‘best' in the country! While they are hard to tamper with, they are very heavy and big - taking up a lot of storage room and harder to move to the voting site (especially if it’s snowing!) as they are not very portable! As a former poll-watcher (someone who checks in on election locations to see the tally on the machines and comparing/checking it against the voter log count) I find this article “In Defense of Lever Voting Machines” correct and useful for those that do not know much about this sort of machine. The lever machine has a history in NY and I think, in part because of this, is part of our culture: the first voting machine in the nation was used in Lockport, NY (upstate/Western New York).