Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org
Some HR-811 proponents state that while DREs may be bad we have them now and we need to fix what we have.
My problem with this thinking is that we are talking about elections; not a line of computers. Think about those things you know about for a minute. If your University purchased a specialized computer that failed as much as DREs do; would your University keep it and try to fix it for the future or would you send it back and go somewhere else? If you used an online legal library that was missing references; would you keep using that library or pay the money to change to another one? I know that when I was doing nuclear refueling on Naval ships if I had a tool that failed constantly, use of that tool would be stopped immediately and something else would be designed for use.
The big issue is that the special computer would never have gone on the market; the reference library would never have gone online; and the tool would never have been sold to the Navy. Industry does not work that way.
Why is it that our elections are not as important as our work? Why is it that it's alright to allow a technology that has constantly failed to continue to be used? And why is it that we can continue to use it while trying to fix the problems? How many votes are to be lost, flipped, or not counted while we continue to allow the use of the machines that are responsible for the loss, flipping and not counting? ...
Says 'Voting Machine Purists Should Not Let The Perfect be the Enemy of the Good'
We Disagree With Both the Premise and the Conclusion... LINK
Losing candidate says slow response times may have caused undervote in Sarasota County LINK
Cuyahoga Board of Elections can use some new blood, and more than one member who pays attention to the job LINK
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
