Florida does elections so well

JBrown72073 at cs.com JBrown72073 at cs.com
Tue Sep 10 20:59:46 PDT 2002



>At 06:43 PM 9/10/2002 -0400, doug wrote:
>>[are things as bad as this press release says?]
>>
Sounds like it, from what I'm hearing on the local news. Jeb Bush declared a 'state of emergency' and the polls were open for an extra 2 hours. They're only open 7a-7p here--no doubt another reason the south is 'so conservative.'

In NY the polls are open 6a-9p, if I remember correctly.

Fortunately we (in Gainesville, Fla) still have paper ballots, which you mark with a pen and then feed into a machine at the polling place. The machine records the vote but there's a paper backup.

Before this, we were all saying that the electronic machines are the worst possible choice, lever machines being the best and punch-cards somewhere in between. But we were arguing that electronic machines were bad because there was no independent paper record of the vote, the software company keeps its encryption methods secret, there is no standardization for the screens, etc. etc. We forgot the obvious: computers malfunction at a high rate; when they do, there is no recourse; use enough of them, you're bound to have problems.

It was a deliberate Jeb! strategy, of course, to go for the electronic machines. The leg. spent a lot of our money on them, over the objections of various experts and citizen groups. Rebecca Mercuri at Bryn Mawr has compiled a lot of info on the pitfalls of electronic voting; see http://www.notablesoftware.com She argues that there's a basic conflict with electronic voting--if you keep the anonymity of the voter, you lose the ability to audit the results; lose the anonymity, you jeopardize ballot secrecy. What can be done simply with a paper ballot turns out to be very difficult to make foolproof electronically.

I have to admit I'm looking forward to the next few days of election news. Sick, I know.

Jenny Brown



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list