"Audits of elections lengthens the time to close an election and it adds significantly to the cost of doing the election."
"So far every jurisdiction that has tried to audit or recount paper records produced by DRE=s, and has to do so with humans instead of technology, the counts are taking exponentially longer times to complete than any other form of voting"
The GAO and many other studies have told us how unreliable these machines are, necessitating audits, which are going to add to the time and expense of an election (see Rady Ananda’s overview of major expert studies on voting machines at http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_rady_ana_070102_overview_of_major_ex.htm ). Doug Lewis’s response: stick with the quickie electronic/no audit election in which heads you lose, tails you lose. Holt’s choice is to pour many millions into machines we still won’t be able to make secure (it’s actually worse than that, see Nancy Tobi’s Summary of e-Voting as a Ponzi Scheme Download this article in PDF format). Or do we change the system so that it produces accurate results the first time, requiring less need for these audits. The problem is we mortals only know of one way to do it right the first timeB and that’s hand counted paper
ballots.
Doug Lewis's problem with having people count the votes by hand- whether it's an audit or a recount (or the actual first count, which words I don’t think would pass his lips)- is that it takes too long and machines are oh so much better at counting that we mortals.
Doug Lewis: "thre is the rub. Humans count large numbers of ballots less accurately than voting equipment does. The higher you establish the Arequired@ percentage to be counted the more you will find discrepancies Y and those discrepancies are rarely the voting equipment=s numbers. It is because humans either make a mistake in counting or because a human interprets a ballot differently than the equipment. Humans get tired. Their minds wander when counting large numbers of ballots by hand.”
It's the conclusion that he draws from our shared objections to the Holt Bill which reveal the underlying problem with the entire discussion around voting in the United States. It starts with machines and it assumes machines can do a better job than people. And so our legislators, whose desire to be reelected creates a conflict of interest of the first order, have placed the machines over us: Machines ruling over human beings on the single issue which determines whether we remain a free self-governing people.
But the Constitution and the Bill of Rights do not start with machines and they don’t start with belief in technology. They start with the assumption that power corrupts and must always be vigilantly checked and guarded against. They start with our right to be a free people, which we accomplish by being able to choose who our representatives will be. It’s really that simple. Are you willing to entrust your ability to remain self-governing to a machine when even the government’s own technical advisor (the National Institute of Standards and Technology is technical advisor to the EAC) has reported that:
"the DRE provides no independent capability to detect whether fraud has not caused errors in the records. In principle, a single clever, dishonest programmer in a voting machine company could rig an entire statewide election" and the NIST research staff "do not know how to write testable requirements to satisfy that the software in a DRE is correct.”
As the GAO has found, it’s not any better with an optical scanner if it’s not being heavily audited. Whether these machines glitch out because they were produced or programmed poorly or glitch in one direction, because they were programmed to do that, they are too unreliable and insecure to vote on. No amount of money can change what science has not wrought. If we have to vote on them, We the People have lost.
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