Voting For President Should Be As Secure As A 25 Cent Bet In Las Vegas

NYtimes continues its series on BBV.

Gambling On Voting

If election officials want to convince voters that electronic voting can be trusted, they should be willing to make it a at least as secure as slot machines. To appreciate how poor the oversight on voting ssytems is, it's useful to look at the way Nevada systematically ensures that electronic gambling machines in Las Vegas operate honestly and accurately. Electronic voting, by comparison, is rife with lax procedures, security risks and conflicts of interest.

snip

1. The state has access to all gambling software

2. The software on gambling machines is constantly being spot-checked.

3. There are meticulous, constantly updated standards for gambling machines.

4. Manufacturers are intensively scrutinized before they are licensed to sell gambling software or hardware.

5. The lab that certifies gambling equipment has an arms-length relationship with the manufacturers it polices, and is open to inquiries from the public.

6. When there is a dispute about a machine, a gambler has a right to an immediate investigation.

In each of the above cases, the NYTimes compares, in some depth, slot machines to BBV and the voting machines come up WAY SHORT.

Article ends with the following:

A Vote for president should be at least as secure as a 25-cent bet in Las Vegas.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/opinion/13SUN1.html

that ought to get a dialogue going and make it harder for our Reps to hide their heads in the sand

and their on-going crappy coverage of Kerry.

Iwon't mention the ways they've covered Junior's sorry ass.

It really brings it home.

DTH

Print and leave in places where people can read it.....

Good material for LTTEs

Thanks for posting.......it's a really good comparison.

Kanary

I've sent a few letter to the New York Times saying that we should get the corporations out of voting altogether.

Use plain paper ballots printed by the state.

Voters deposit these into transparent ballot boxes, and can wait around for a public handcount by 2 Democrats and 2 Republicans.

This would take less time and money than building/testing/training regarding electronic voting machines.

But the NY Times has never published one of my letters saying this.

July when they broke the story on Avi Rubin's study of Diebold's software:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70A15F73E5B0C778EDDAE0894DB404482
They have a link to many of their BBV stories (though oldest is dated 1/18/04 - many more were published last year) on their editorial page:
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/opinion/making-votes-count.html?pagewanted=all
Adam Cohen at the Times is driving this, and I think he speaks with Bev frequently. Send the Times (letters@nytimes.com or nytnews@nytimes.com) or Cohen (adam.cohen@nytimes.com maybe?) an email when you can and thank them for covering the issue so relentlessly.

And here's an interesting page I found when searching for the NY Times article I noted above. It lists many, many BBV articles over the past couple years:
http://www.independent-media.tv/gtheme.cfm?ftheme_id=3&fdate_posted=%7Bts%20'2003-11-03%2000:00:00'%7D

paraphrasing...'any count of our money must be done accurately or heads roll. votes...eh'

:(

:kick: