08-21-2008, 02:55 PM
|
 |
Senior Member
|
|
Join Date: Jun 2008
Location: Beautiful conservative Central Oregon
Gender: 
Posts: 1,373
Thanks: 157
Thanked 306 Times in 258 Posts
|
|
States throw out costly electronic voting machines
Quote:
The demise of touch-screen voting has produced a graveyard of expensive corpses: Warehouses stacked with thousands of carefully wrapped voting machines that have been shelved because of doubts about vanishing votes and vulnerability to hackers.
What to do with this high-tech junkyard is a multimillion-dollar question. One manufacturer offered $1 a piece to take back its ATM-like machines. Some states are offering the devices for sale on eBay and craigslist. Others hope to sell their inventories to Third-World countries or salvage them for scrap.
A few more are holding out hope that the machines, some of which were purchased for as much as $5,000, could one day be resurrected.
"We store them very, very carefully in the hopes that someone, someday may decide that we can use them again," said San Diego County Registrar Deborah Seiler, whose jurisdiction spent $25 million on the devices.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. After the disputed 2000 presidential recount, Congress provided more than $3 billion to replace punch card and lever-operated machines. State officials across the country said the new systems would eliminate human error and political tampering.
But problems with the machines soon followed: vanishing votes, breakdowns, malfunctions and increasing evidence that the devices were vulnerable to hackers.
Beginning last year, states including California, Ohio and Florida abruptly ordered election officials to mothball their electronic machines. Over the last two years, the percentage of registered voters relying on touch-screen technology dropped from 44 percent to 36 percent.
In November, when the presidential race between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain ends, an estimated 57 percent of voters will rely on paper ballots.
But reverting to paper has caused its own problems. During this year's primary season, record numbers of voters showed up. That caused ballots to run out, which delayed the often-cumbersome task of feeding paper ballots into scanning machines.
|
TBO.com - News From AP
SOAPBOX TIME!!!
These people need to take a look at how we vote in Oregon. Everyone here gets to vote in their kitchen, in their car, in their bathroom or in their underwear. See, we use Vote By Mail here. It's the single best way to carry out an election. It's cheaper, easier, more reliable and, if it was done nationwide with one results release date, would eliminate the media's election day influence.
__________________
~
~
~
Our nation has not always lived up to its ideals, yet those ideals have never ceased to guide us. They expose our flaws, and lead us to mend them. We are the beneficiaries of the work of the generations before us and it is each generation's responsibility to continue that work. - Laura Bush
God is a conservative -
Ecclesiastes 10:2--"A wise man's heart inclines him to the right, but a fool's heart to the left."
|
Linear Mode
