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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.<BR>
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Read the excerpt below from this article:<BR>
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</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" BACK="#ffffff" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" SIZE=2 PTSIZE=10 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" FACE="Arial" LANG="0">By Michael Powell and Peter Slevin<BR>
Washington Post Staff Writers<BR>
Wednesday, December 15, 2004; Page A01<BR>
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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.<BR>
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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."<BR>
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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."</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" BACK="#ffffff" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" SIZE=3 PTSIZE=12 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" FACE="Arial" LANG="0"><BR>
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V2020 Post by Ted Moffett<BR>
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