Transparency

A look at how the Democratic Party defines democracy. LOL!

It's an article of faith among many Progressive activists that electronic voting machines are a thing of evil, that these machines are somehow programmed to steal votes from Democrats, and that any and all Democratic election losses are directly attributable to this electronic menace. And who knows, this contention may very well be accurate.

The problem with this perception is the same as that afflicting the arguments of so-called "Intelligent Design" advocates, namely that faith-based assumptions rest on thin evidentiary reeds. Despite what is alleged to be a massive, nationwide and ongoing fraud that would constitute a federal crime, no successful court case has yet been brought, let alone litigated successfully, that would support the assertions of the Dieboldistas. Now, this may be because everyone is in on the conspiracy; but the more natural conclusion, and one more in line with Occam's Razor, is that this vast conspiracy does not exist. The test may very well be the litigation underway over the contested results in Fl-13. But as things stand today, the verified-voting crowd is setting up an argument which is essentially not falsifiable – "votes are being stolen in ways we can't see or verify", and that should, in my mind, offend the reality-based community.

My personal argument with the Dieboldistas is this: there is, as noted, a bit of a disparity between the fervor with which they advance their claims, and the underlying evidentiary record; and more importantly, by engaging in a small-bore faith-based conspiracy theory, they're discrediting and hindering a realization that should be manifest to everyone, namely that our system of elections is deeply and perhaps irredeemably flawed. I'd go further and say that the Diebold crowd, by positing fraud as the proximate cause of every problem with the electoral process, weakens the case that must be made for fixing the system itself. Ironically, they argue for fraud in exactly the same way that, as noted, advocates of "Intelligent Design" argue for their designer, as the root default cause that explains everything. Tin foil hats are fashionable across the political spectrum, it seems.

Thanks to dana boyd, the high priestess of social networking, I found this wonderful site with some frighteningly real parody ads of Deibold, one of the two companies in the country that manufacture electronic voting machines --and which may have won the Republicans 8 years of elections.

Rand Creaga writes:

I came into possession of the image of Stalin casting a vote, and wondered what the ghastly old fellow might have made of the new touchscreen voting technology. A magazine ad suggested itself, and then another, and another... They're arranged here in the order conceived; after two days inspiration

This site would make Brad Friedman, the blogosphere's anti-Diebold crusader, a very happy man.

Enjoy.

Some have criticized NY State for being behind in compliance with the Federal government's HAVA requirements for new voting machines, but in reality our state may be slow because we are being more careful. While many states are simply taking vendor statements at face value (something I NEVER do in my job and our government shouldn't either), NY State has been standing its ground, even if in some cases it has only been because of a lack of decisiveness among our legislators. From Vote Trust USA:

The history of New York's purported non-compliance with Help America Vote Act (HAVA) is a long one. Much has been made of HAVA's lack of requirements for voter-verified paper audit records (VVPARs) or paper ballots that can be used to allow independent verification of e-voting system tallies produced by Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) and Optical Scan (OS) systems (paper ballots provide this capability inherently of course). But bills in the New York State legislature from both sides of the aisle have required VVPARs with random audits since at least 2004. New Yorkers may be stubborn but they're not stupid.

It would be patently absurd to replace a transparent, statewide, non-proprietary, low-tech mechanical lever voting system that even prevents write-in overvotes and can only be corrupted the old fashioned way -- one machine at a time -- with opaque, proprietary, computerized e-voting systems, programmed en masse by as few as a single insider, with no means of independent verification whatsoever. And contrary to popular belief the potential for programming error or malfeasance applies equally to DRE and Optical Scan technologies. Fortunately, the independent verification issue was resolved here years ago; the legislature declared, "There shall be paper." So too was the issue of source code escrow, which recently prompted at least one major e-voting vendor (Diebold Election Systems) not to compete in the state of North Carolina. As in the Tarheel State, the escrow of vendors' proprietary software has been a requirement in New York's legislation for years.