Bob Koehler quotes Land Shark in his column! "Faith Based Voting"

[Amaryllis]

Faith-Based Voting
'Without procedural integrity, you have nothing'

By ROBERT C. KOEHLER
Tribune Media Services

March 30, 2006

Oh, those glitches!

For some reason we tolerate them a lot more in an election — that is to say, in the mechanics of democracy, something we affect to believe in so fervently we're willing to go to war to make sure other countries have it — than we would in, let's say, our banking system.

Last week's primary election fiasco here in Chicago and Cook County — a fiasco of such ballot-eating magnitude that the city and county, which each had separate deals with Sequoia Voting Systems, are withholding more than $30 million remaining on their respective contracts with that company — should have generated howls of outrage. Instead, the tone of the local coverage of the chaotic transition from punch cards to optical-scan and touch-screen voting struck me more as tepid bemusement.

Most infuriating was the scattershot use of the trivializing, blame-avoidance word "glitch," which reduces disenfranchisement to oh well, gosh, just one of those things. The media can live with glitches. They still get their numbers to report. They still get "results," which, in our world of breathless headlines and two-second sound bites, are all that matter. Voting - democracy — is the booster engine that produces winners, then quietly disappears.

The operative assumption is that, despite the chaos, vulnerability to fraud and enormous cost, electronic voting is inevitable, "modern." And once you eliminate the human-error factor, it's, you know, infallible.

This, of course, is preposterous; every line of code in a voting program was written by a human. Our vote is hostage to a flawed, secret system of counting that almost no one understands.


http://www.commonwonders.com/

[EFerrari]

1. kick

[Amaryllis]

11. CLICK ON THE LINK TO READ THE REST! I forgot to indicate there

was more!

[liam_laddie]

2. K & R

With gusto! :kick:

[flyarm]

3. i saved landsharks post..here it is..

sorry Landshark..i don't have the Du link..but i had sent this to our dec chair earlier today so she could read it..fly


Glitches are BAIT, Whether Intended to Be or Not Is Irrelevant
Mark these words: The Glitches will get Solved. Mostly.

What will be left are the unseen and undetectable glitches and fraud within the software, all wrapped sweetly in the appearance of a smooth election, with handshakes all around between vendors and elections officials, and pre-prepared press releases all going out on time with the magic numbers inserted.

If this industry was bold and visionary enough to come up with HAVA, a thing so radical that most activists are left suggesting helpful modifications of the basic idea, fearful (and with some good reason) that anything more appropriate wouldn't be "realistic". Victory to the visionary, at least for now.

So Thomas Friedman's article in today's or yesterday's NYT is most instructive: If you control the name (or the frame) you control the result. Friedman used the example of how big oil defines alternative energy as a frivolous unrealistic nice try, so that it is never seen as a necessary responsible matter of eventual survival economically and perhaps physically.

I doubt these machines are really this bad for this long through sheer negligence. It smells more like BAIT to me. BAIT for activists to invest all their eggs in the anti-glitch basket, so that the companies can then solve their software problems and pronounce victory, with the new electronic age of reliability fully at hand. They most certainly WILL do so, at the very first semi-credible opportunity.

But then the vendors will have what they really want: a fat contract that can never be allowed to fail (so the government must bail) and a product with built in lack of accountability through secret vote counting software.

Plus, the power to select any politician they want. Even if they never used this power, all politicians had best err on the side of caution and not cross these corporations, cause who knows?? But then, we have it straight from Diebold that Sequoia's parent got into elections for the express purpose of election fraud. http://legistar.county.allegheny.pa.us/attachments/3868... Takes one to know one?

It seems to me that these glitches are, in effect, bait. They'll be solved, and they'll function as bait regardless of whether they are intended to be such. Why? Because it's highly likely that beta test elections will improve reliability over time, wiping out the activist investment in anti-glitch information, and creating the illusion of progress. And progress is the very illusion that got them started in the first place. As if it's "progress" to eliminate most of the checks and balances in our elections, and hide the counting of the vote from the Public it is supposed to serve.

[understandinglife]

4. #4.

If You're pro-Bu$h, You're Anti-America

[Land Shark]

5. Now i'm even more embarrassed, you beat me to the punch and

it clearly takes me more than the four minutes Amaryllis beat me by to cut and paste something into a post with a brief intro comment!! : )

[bleever]

6. Koehler nails the whole "glitch" mirage, thanks to Land Shark.

Proud to know you.

:patriot:

[Land Shark]

7. loved his closing line about faith-based: Where's the reverence??

[kster]

8. K&R....nt

[Amaryllis]

9. CLICK ON THE LINK TO READ THE REST! I forgot to indicate there

was more when I put in the link ...can't believe I did that! I was excited because this is a really good article!
So click on the link and read the rest!

[FogerRox]

10. Kn R ing