*****SPAM***** [Politech] Who's afraid of digital voting? Jim Lucier points to John Fund article...

From: Declan McCullagh (declan@private)
Date: Mon Jul 26 2004 - 22:04:25 PDT


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-------- Original Message --------
Subject: For Politech--Who's afraid of digital voting?
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 22:45:28 -0400
From: James Lucier
To: Declan McCullagh <declan@private>

NOTE TO DECLAN:  FEEL FREE TO KEEP MY NAME ON THIS POST, BUT PLEASE DELETE
MY RETURN ADDRESS.  IT'S NEW ACCOUNT I AM TRYING TO KEEP UN-SPAMMED.  JIM

Hello Declan:

For a long time I have wondered how anyone who believes that properly
constructed, authenticated, and encrypted paperless transactions can be
safer and more secure than paper based transactions by any reasonable
standard can buy into the theory that digital balloting can never work
unless it achieves some impossible degree of perfection.

I would like to call your attention to an outstanding new article by John
Fund of the Wall Street Journal, who has a book on ballot theft and election
fraud coming out this fall.

The link is here:

http://opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110005405


Money quote:

"The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights has generally supported
electronic voting because the voters who are most likely to be helped by
DREs are (a) the disabled (they can vote without assistance); (b) the less
educated (they're comforted by the machines' similarity to the ATM); (c) the
elderly (you can increase the type size) and (d) citizens with limited
English skills (the machines are multilingual).

  Indeed, whatever problems DREs have must be compared to other existing
systems. In last year's California recall election, punch-card systems
didn't register a valid vote on 6.3% of all ballots cast. For optical scan
systems, the under-vote rate was 2.7% and for DREs it was only 1.5%. As for
the theories that DREs could be programmed to change an election outcome,
Mr. Andrew dismissed them by saying, "the liberal Internet activists are
bonkers." John Lott, an American Enterprise Institute economist who has
studied election systems, adds that some of the obsession about DREs,
"sounds a lot like an effort to anger some people into voting while
providing the basis for lots of election litigation if the results are
close.""


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