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Reply #13: Sorry, but you DO have to explain HOW the machines could have miscounted so many votes. [View All]

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Bill Bored Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Aug-14-09 01:48 PM
Response to Reply #11
13. Sorry, but you DO have to explain HOW the machines could have miscounted so many votes.
Otherwise, you're wasting our time. It's as simple as that.

You do not decide unilaterally where the onus should be placed. The risks of the voting system have to be weighed and from there, we can decide where the onus should be placed. Have you figured out how many lever machines would have to be rigged to account for the exit poll discrepancy yet? If not, why not? Come on, give us the number! It's not that hard. There are 20,000 machines and about 8,000,000 voters. How many votes per machine would have to be switched, on average, to account for the NY exit poll discrepancy?

After you tell us the answer, you can tell us HOW it could have been done, how it's plausible and why it's easier than hacking a couple of exit poll servers that did in fact go up and down like yoo-yoos on election night in 2004!

Re HCPB, you really don't know much about New York, do you? Lever machines replaced HCPB starting in the 1890s in NY because HCPB was a corrupt system at the time. This is one reason why HCPB is a non-starter in NY today.

But New Yorkers have tried to get HCPB numerous times and failed -- in Federal Court and at the State Board of Elections. Even just for Federal Elections. Even as a check on uncertified optical scanners this year. Those pushing for statistical audits (significant numbers of HCPBs) have tried and failed for years to get them in NY. No one wants to hear about it because it involved HAND COUNTS.

The goal of most NY election officials now is to hand count as FEW paper ballots as possible. This was not the case when the only paper ballots were absentee, emergency and provisional ballots, but it damn well is the case now -- because there will be many millions of paper ballots!

Have YOU ever advocated for HCPB in the REAL WORLD? Very few people actually have. They like to post about it on message boards, but that's about it.

Here's the bottom line when it comes to election integrity:
No matter who you talk to in the REAL WORLD, Vote Counting is always someone else's problem. Election lawyers, candidates, election officials and legislatures don't want to deal with it. Even election integrity advocates can't tell you how they will verify computerized vote counts. They will parrot something about "audits and recounts" or worse, "auditability and recountability", but without thinking through how that's really going to work on a large scale for lots of elections, or even just Federal elections. And those are the folks on OUR side!

So despite everything we've learned about not trusting software, the counting is delegated to software anyway, or to any other convenient method -- whether it can be verified or not. That is -- until it's too late and someone loses a close election and they are seen as a "sore loser." And you know the rest.

Of all the methods out there, levers are the best. Anyone who says otherwise just hasn't studied the problem or the history. HCPB can work, but it's not on the table in most parts of the country.

Look at Humboldt County, CA: Big HCPB advocate there. But now they're rescanning ballots with more computers and trying to shove that down everyone else's throat, including New York's!

There is also a federal case that might even set a bad precedent against HCPB, but that's another story. Also, HCPB allows overvotes, which might be considered by some to be unconstitutional, unless it's the only statewide system. Potentially, this could result in HCPB being phased out where it still exists. Yet we have no real way of checking the counts of any other system -- except the lever machines.

You talk as if Al Gore actually got his recount. He would have easily won Florida on election night if they had voted on lever machines. (No overvotes!) And he screwed up big time by not asking for a statewide recount from the get go by the way. I wish he had won, of course, but it would not have even been close enough to steal if they had voted on levers.
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