Voting in the Land of Oz and "Intelligent Design": an MSM rebuttal

Kansas City straddles a state line between two scarlet states. Kansas and Missouri once started the Civil War (word never got back to DC)in 1855, now celebrated at a football or basketball game once a year.

Who would think that in an "Intelligently Created" land, that the All-Powerful Protennoia would be second guessed on Paperless Voting Trails by the MSM? Yet, it happened!

Our Knight-Ridder KCStar published an OpEd by Dane Zeller, a technology instructor at Wentworth Academy. At the URL catch the full story. Excerpts below.

In Finn Bullers’ “Casting Vote on Voting Systems” (12/25), a former Johnson County election commissioner, Connie Schmidt, defends the use of touch-screen voting machines that do not produce a verifiable paper audit trail. In “Casting Vote on Voting Systems” (12/25), a former Johnson County election commissioner, Connie Schmidt, defends the use of touch-screen voting machines that do not produce a verifiable paper audit trail.

Her argument cites the adding machine that once had paper, but now has none, and her faith in Microsoft Excel to “do our budgets … I doubt that anyone hand-adds it all up.”

-snip-

Schmidt asks us to trust the touch-screen voting machine to record and report our vote correctly, as we trust computers to assist in landing our planes and help in heart surgery. Again, such examples don’t carry her point well: When air-traffic control software makes a mistake, the audit trail follows the path of airplane pieces strewn along the countryside. When voting machine software fails, a candidate becomes an officeholder.

-snip-

The voter touches the screen to vote and touches the screen to verify the vote. We may as well hire the fox to count the chickens.

The answer is simple. Use the touch-screen to vote, have the machine print out the marked ballot, have the voter review the paper ballot, and, when verified by the voter, place the paper ballot in a locked box. Unlock the box and use the contents to verify a close election or to perform an audit of the machine performance.

It’s not the paper, it’s the trail. If a bank could not make available our canceled checks or a bank statement or a current balance, we wouldn’t stand for it beyond a few seconds. We should be so protective of our votes.

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/opinion/1...