[Vision2020] "Democracy on the Cheap"

[Tbertruss at aol.com]

All:

So ATMs are demanded to have more accuracy than voting machines?  Seems 
appropriate.  Money is more important than fair, honest and well managed elections. 
 I mean, what do people think, that we are trying to serve as an example of 
democracy and the virtues of elections for the rest of the world?  No, not at 
all.  We are an example of how consumerism makes everyone so happy, so ATMs 
must function with a high accuracy with this goal in mind, while voters feel like 
they are playing slot machines in Vegas.  Sometimes they pull the lever and 
nothing happens but their tax dollars disappearing into the taxation without 
representation coffers.

Read the excerpt below from this article:

By Michael Powell and Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, December 15, 2004; Page A01
 
In Florida, ground zero for 2000's election meltdown, professors and graduate 
students from the University of California at Berkeley studied this year's 
voting results, contrasting counties that had electronic voting machines with 
those that used traditional voting methods. They concluded, based on voting and 
population trends and other indicators, that irregularities associated with 
machines in three traditionally Democratic counties in southern Florida may have 
delivered at least 130,000 excess votes for Bush in a state the president won 
by about 381,000 votes. The study prompted heated critiques from some polling 
experts.

Stewart of MIT was skeptical, too. But he ran the numbers and came up with 
the same result. "You can't break it; I've tried," Stewart said. "There's 
something funky in the results from the electronic-machine Democratic counties."

Berkeley sociologist Michael Hout, who directed the study, said the problem 
in Florida probably lies with the technology. (Florida's touch-screen machines 
lack paper records.) "I've always viewed this as a software problem, not a 
corruption problem," he said. "We'd never tolerate this level of errors with an 
ATM. The problem is that we continue to do democracy on the cheap."
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V2020 Post by Ted Moffett
















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