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Who's afraid of digital voting? Jim Lucier points to John Fund article...
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 09:23:50 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com> Date: July 27, 2004 1:04:25 AM EDT To: politech () politechbot comSubject: [Politech] Who's afraid of digital voting? Jim Lucier points to John Fund article...
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: For Politech--Who's afraid of digital voting? Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 22:45:28 -0400 From: James Lucier To: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>NOTE TO DECLAN: FEEL FREE TO KEEP MY NAME ON THIS POST, BUT PLEASE DELETE MY RETURN ADDRESS. IT'S NEW ACCOUNT I AM TRYING TO KEEP UN-SPAMMED. JIM
Hello Declan: For a long time I have wondered how anyone who believes that properly constructed, authenticated, and encrypted paperless transactions can be safer and more secure than paper based transactions by any reasonable standard can buy into the theory that digital balloting can never work unless it achieves some impossible degree of perfection.I would like to call your attention to an outstanding new article by John Fund of the Wall Street Journal, who has a book on ballot theft and election
fraud coming out this fall. The link is here: http://opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110005405 Money quote: "The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights has generally supported electronic voting because the voters who are most likely to be helped byDREs are (a) the disabled (they can vote without assistance); (b) the less educated (they're comforted by the machines' similarity to the ATM); (c) the
elderly (you can increase the type size) and (d) citizens with limited English skills (the machines are multilingual). Indeed, whatever problems DREs have must be compared to other existing systems. In last year's California recall election, punch-card systemsdidn't register a valid vote on 6.3% of all ballots cast. For optical scan systems, the under-vote rate was 2.7% and for DREs it was only 1.5%. As for the theories that DREs could be programmed to change an election outcome,
Mr. Andrew dismissed them by saying, "the liberal Internet activists are bonkers." John Lott, an American Enterprise Institute economist who has studied election systems, adds that some of the obsession about DREs, "sounds a lot like an effort to anger some people into voting while providing the basis for lots of election litigation if the results are close."" _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/) ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- Who's afraid of digital voting? Jim Lucier points to John Fund article... David Farber (Jul 30)