Today's Seattle Times: "County election officials prefer Diebold".
The Lying Bastards at King County Elections are pushing the Council to spend $1.7 million on Diebold high-speed ballot tabulation equipment for the transition to forced mail voting. This is dumb. Not just because Diebold is a controversial vendor whose high-speed tabulators haven't even been certified by the federal government yet, but because high-speed tabulation equipment is unnecessary.
She-Ron's business case is founded on this:
Upgraded equipment will allow King County to pre-process and tabulate all ballots available on Election Day and report more results on election nightThat's pointless. A large percentage of mail ballots aren't even available for tabulation until after Election Day (Last November in King County it was 33%). With close contests, it takes days to get the final results. There's no value in reporting a few more votes on Election Night. Besides which, the real bottlenecks in mail ballot processing are not tabulation, but verification and duplication.
When a democrat starts an election-equipment company and gets King County to buy its gear, then I'll be worried. Fortunately, since democrats can't actually run businesses, this will never happen.
Posted by: Why Not Diebold? on April 24, 2007 11:06 AMBusiness as usual at KCRE
Posted by: Chris on April 24, 2007 11:07 AMThis equipment just allows them to make the determinaton of how many mystery ballots will be necessary to sway the election sooner rather than later.
Posted by: Smoley on April 24, 2007 11:09 AMThe other thing is this endless love for "Technology" advancement....no matter what the cost/benefit. Buying EXPENSIVE equipment makes it look like they are doing something. It also implies a major problem for King Kounty Elections was technology....instead of the real problems of Incompetence and Illegal Acts.
Stefan, thanks again for pulling off the covers on King Kounty Elections. The Emporer has no clothes!
Posted by: Mr. Cynical on April 24, 2007 11:45 AMThe article mentioned one of the following as a Councilmember's concern but didn't flesh them out much. Two important issues with the Diebold suite of products that they are proposing spending $1.7 million on are:
1. A unique barcode is placed upon each ballot, so that each individual ballot can be tracked through the system. While this is alleged to provide "voter confidence that their vote was counted", it also provides the ability to determine how an individual voter voted.
Ballots should be tracked at the batch level, with checks and balances to ensure that the same number of ballots are in the batch at every checkpoint, but ballots should never be tracked (or even trackable) at the ballot level.
2. The system provides a process (and the Secretary of State appears poised to allow this!) to "pre-scan" the ballots into the equipment in the days preceeding election day, and to "tabulate" the ballots after 8pm on election night.
Do you really think the first time election officials see the results is after 8pm on election night, when they have that information for days ahaead of time with pre-scanning? No way.
Can you imaging Ron's minions having the numbers and knowing how many more votes Queen Christine needs to make her goal in King County and secure the race statewide BEFORE ELECTION DAY?
2004 is going to look like a model of election administration.
Posted by: Can't We Just Have A Clean Election? on April 24, 2007 11:45 AMBetween RON & SHE-RON scrambling around pretentding to "Investigate" and make King County Elections more crime-free, all I see is a couple of Cartoon Character Detectives.
Let's call RON & SHE-RON aks DICK & DICKLESS TRACY!
Between RON & SHE-RON scrambling around pretentding to "Investigate" and make King County Elections more crime-free, all I see is a couple of Cartoon Character Detectives.
Let's call RON & SHE-RON aka DICK & DICKLESS TRACY!
Between RON & SHE-RON scrambling around pretentding to "Investigate" and make King County Elections more crime-free, all I see is a couple of Cartoon Character Detectives.
Let's call RON & SHE-RON aka DICK & DICKLESS TRACY!
By the late Saddam Hussein.
Posted by: Rey Smith on April 24, 2007 12:04 PMIf the people of King County can't read and follow ballot marking instructions - to the tune of over 50,000 needing "copying" so a machine can read the ballot, how can they ever be expected to read and follow bus/train routes and schedules?
Will the Diebold machines:
- reduce the volume of "copied" ballots?
- improve signature verification?
- reduce duplicate ballots being mailed?
- guarantee military ballots being included and counted?
- reject ballots from dead (died before ballots printed) people?
- objectively determine voter intent?
- guarantee that provisional ballots are rejected if a regular ballot was already voted?
- guarantee that ALL ballots are received and processed for the FIRST count?
- guarantee that absolutely no ballots are "found" if recounts are required?
Yep. Seems as if the Diebold machine should be the very first order of business in cleaning up the elections process......
Posted by: SouthernRoots on April 24, 2007 12:25 PMhttp://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070305-diebold-may-leave-e-voting-business.html
Posted by: RobNix on April 24, 2007 01:51 PMThere should be a database that lists each citizen, and how they voted...just like Congress.
That is the only way to insure fairness.
It makes each man bear the burden of his vote.
"I choose not to vote" may become ballot option in Florida
Of course, that would require a modicum of common sense from our legislators... something thing constantly prove they are sorely lacking.
Posted by: Ragnar Danneskjold on April 24, 2007 03:13 PMSwatter@18, are you saying that no one would actually disagree with calling KCE "lying bastards" unless they were planted by some mysterious organization? lol.
Posted by: Bruce on April 24, 2007 05:24 PMYou post here enough, are you part of that "base"?
So leave it to Ron and team to throw money at the problem, when that still won't make the USPS and those last day mailed ballots move any faster.
There's nothing wrong with King County Elections that good organization and good procedures could not fix. The problem is the management, not the technology.
Posted by: Jeff B. on April 24, 2007 11:12 PM