There has been a lot of joking and innuendo about Diebold voting machines and certainly many critics have imagined that the ways that an election could be stolen by hacking the voting machines. I have always thought that electronic voting, although holding a great amount of potential, is absolutely worthless without some kind of paper receipt for voters, no to mention a paper trail for recounts.
Paper trail issues aside, the Open Voting Foundation has actually put their hands on one of these little technomonsters and have pulled it apart only to come to some interesting and scary conclusions:
“Diebold has made the testing and certification process practically irrelevant,” according to Dechert. “If you have access to these machines and you want to rig an election, anything is possible with the Diebold TS — and it could be done without leaving a trace. All you need is a screwdriver.” This model does not produce a voter verified paper trail so there is no way to check if the voter’s choices are accurately reflected in the tabulation.
Lets say you are a voting area with a heavy dominance of one party or another. Want to mess with the totals? Flip the switch. That’s all you need.
Why isn’t the need for a paper trail obvious?
Okay, I’ll admit it. I am taken by advocate Al Gore. Listening to Al Gore as he warns of the gloom and doom of global warming, I wonder where this guy was in 2000 when pundits were on good days saying he was cold and wooden and on bad days, were accusing him of stretching the truth (don’t get me started…liberal media my foot).
I understand the attraction that Robyn Blumner feels as she writes in yesterday’s St. Petersburg Times about “real deal” Al Gore. And she is right…
Oh, I don’t mean the alpha-male wanna-be, that scripted, stiff, uninspired candidate for president in 2000. I mean the self-effacing movie star with man-of-steel conviction from An Inconvenient Truth, who is trying to shake this country by the shoulders over the dire consequences of global warming. From the ashes of his overhandled “be everything to everybody” campaign rose the real Al Gore, a confident, wonkish, accessible intellect who has a supremely important question for inhabitants of Earth : How long can you tread water?
The Al Gore that is running around the country with his PowerPoint presentation about global warming is an incredible candidate. His confidence and no-nonsense attitude is certainly what attracted Clinton’s attention in ’92 when he was looking for a running mate.
That’s not who we will get. Nominate Al Gore and you are likely to get a slice of that guy, but once the “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory” Democratic Party will push their media consultants, polling experts and hair stylists on him, that version of Al Gore goes away.
I don’t have an answer to this one, but we do this to ourselves ALL the time. It’s a message we need to take seriously for every election.
Unlike the Helena IR’s editors, who could only bring themselves to say that some people were upset with Senator Burns’ inane remarks, the Missoulian editorial nails it:
Burns’ remarks were characteristic of the kind of know-nothing blather you sometimes hear from the local malcontent in a bar or coffee shop. In this case, Burns claimed to be voicing concerns expressed by some local ranchers. Landowners affected by the fire might be excused, amid stress and loss, for feeling frustration and not understanding why more couldn’t be done to corral a powerful force of nature. But for a U.S. senator to launch such an attack based on his own, sketchy impressions or the uninformed venting of self-appointed experts calls into question Burns’ judgment.
I think Montana can do better than a Senator who sounds like the local drunk pontificating about something he has no idea about. Of course, I do have to temper my praise for the Missoulian a bit. It seems like a reasonable person might have questioned Senator Burns’ judgment well before this. Wonkette offers another reason to question Burns, and a possible explanation for his actions.
Okay, so we were invited along with the rest of the public, so I guess that we didn’t exactly crash it, but Don and I attended one of Tester’s events in Boulder today, and I have to say that it seemed like a big hit. Despite the awful heat, there was a crowd of around 50 and Jon made very brief speech, followed by questions from the crowd. The answers were well-received by the crowd and there seemed to be some energy and excitement around his message.
I will note that I was impressed by the diversity of the group. I think it’s easy, especially as a blogger, to envision the standard Tester supporter, which usually involved looking in a mirror. So see the so many different folks coming out into the nasty Montana weather to hear Jon was quite encouraging indeed.
Maybe I am wrong, but I certainly can’t see our current Junior senator taking open questions from the crowd. Perhaps our readers from the Burns camp can describe one of the Burns community events and prove me wrong.
One brave (and lonely) soul defended Senator Burns in a comment about the Burns fire story at the Gazette. What struck me was just true the defense was, at least in part:
I personally have family members that have worked on forest fires and there is alot of wasteful spending and excessive down times. Burns sees first hand the excessive spending that is wasted by our government. Perhaps we could look at this from his perspective.
If anyone knows first hand about excessive government spending, it’s Conrad Burns. One thing most of us can agree on, though, is that paying people ten bucks an hour to defend homes, ranches and public lands from devastating fires isn’t wasteful.
Everyone except for the Senator seems to know that.
