Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing
click to enlarge
My wife read today’s strip, and after she stopped rolling on the floor laughing, she wiped away the tears and alerted me, “you are gonna get so much hate mail!”
Anyway, at my polling place here in Lewisville, NC, I had the choice of taking the unaffiliated ballot, the Republican Ballot and the Democratic ballot (I am independent). When I looked, he had only three Dem ballots left in the stack. I asked jokingly if he was going to run out. He said, “Oh no, I have more packs in the back – it’s just not many people are voting Republican so far today.” And yes, we had PAPER ballots that you marked with a pen – now black box voting and no chads. Paper and ink.
Afterwards, my wife and I went for breakfast and our waitress noted our “I Voted Today” stickers on our shirts and said she thought about voting, but doesn’t pay any attention to politics (WTF?). She liked Obama so we gave her our Obama pitch. The table next to us had a similar conversation with her and they were talking about how much they liked Bill Clinton and hated Hillary Clinton. They too supported Obama.
Should be an interesting evening.
SPECIAL REQUEST FOR TCD FANS: The San Francisco Chronicle is pondering the addition of new cartoons for their paper – a process that seems to be initiated by Darren Bell, creator of Candorville (one of my daily reads – highly recommended). You can read the Chronicle article here and please add your thoughts to the comments if you wish. If anything, put in a good word for Darren and Candorville.
I am submitting Town Called Dobson to the paper for their consideration. They seem to have given great weight to receiving 200 messages considering Candorville. I am asking TCD fans to try to surpass that amount. (I get more than that many hate mails a day, surely fans can do better?)
This is not a race between Darren and I, it is a hope that more progressive strips can be represented in the printed press of America.
So if you read the San Francisco Chronicle or live in the Bay Area (Google Analytics tell me there are a lot of you), please send your kind comments (or naked, straining outrage) to David Wiegand at his published addresses below. If you are a subscriber, cut out your mailing label and staple it to a TCD strip and include it in your letter.
or
David Wiegand
Executive Datebook Editor
The San Francisco Chronicle
901 Mission St.
San Francisco, CA 94103
how’s the hate mail flowing?
I love it!!!!! LOL!!!!
Going to be cheering for y’all from up here in MD.
Btw – those paper ballots you marked with a pen don’t mean diddly squat if no one counts them.
If only a machine counts them – you have no way of knowing if the machine even cared what your ballot said, or not.
That’s why AUDITS are so important. Without a hand count of at least some of the paper ballots, we’re all living in a fantasy of Democracy. Let’s make it reality by supporting legislation that not only requires paper ballots, but requires those paper ballots be counted.
My electoral fantasy is to have machine-assisted voting where you use a touch screen to select your candidates/positions on proposed legislation/whatever, and then the machine prints out a ballot that you put in the box when it’s exactly the way you want it. Then those ballots are counted by a tabulator that can also be set up to, say, sort the ballots by candidate so you have all the Clinton ballots in one pile, all the Obama ballots in one pile, and all the “Can’t figure this one out/other” ballots in a third pile, and if you want a recount, you just count how many ballots are in the pile (verifying of course that the machine-generated dark ovals really do say “Clinton” or “Obama” or “I Dunno”).
Fast and almost foolproof. No hanging chads, no ambiguous ovals, no “I hit the Obama button but it came up as Clinton four times in a row,” no unverified internal count. There’s no way any system can ever be foolproof because fools (and crooks) are pretty ingenious, but I think this would come close to ideal.
But every time I mention it, I get people who rear up on their hind legs and scream “MACHINES! NO NO NO NO NO NO EVIL BAD MACHINES!!!!!! MUST HAVE ONLY PAPER AND PENCIL!!!!” Some people are so gunshy from the Diebold and ES&S experiences that they just refuse to consider the possibility that there could be a way to do computer-assisted voting that could actually work.
wasn’t a problem of machines but of software and software support and security. Apparently they set up the blame software for each election, it wasn’t like Quickbooks where the software fits many businesses, oh no. Then they created a configuration of thumb drives and modems that just left security risks right and left. They refused to reveal their software (and rightly so with absolutely NO SECURITY. But how would you truly certify the stuff if you couldn’t read the programs (granted most SOS do not program but they can hire folks to do so.)
So you could have a machine that allows you to plug a blind person in with voice activated messages and a phone like bank of buttons where they can vote and get a printed ballot (and a ballot copy in braille even!) to allow assistance without loss of privacy. You can get a printout of what you thought you did or a summary and then get a printout, but that would have foxed Diebold (who already KNEW HOW TO GIVE printouts from ATM machines for crying out loud.) None of this is impossible, but you need to have a configuration that allows for security, true support, true numbers, ability to certify, ability to recount, ability to verify. THAT DIEBOLD HAS NOT WANTED TO DO. And guess what, they delivered on their promise to elect ??? Bush.
Well, I forgot to add one vital part of the ideal voting machine. Its software would be open and readable to the public.
Now you might think this is pointless or dumb, because who would take the time to read the software? I can tell you from personal experience that no matter what language it was written in, there would be plenty of people who would be able to read it, verify it, and suggest fixes for problem areas and security leaks. And any cryptographic expert will tell you that no security system can be called secure unless you can examine the “source code” and verify that it’s bulletproof. Security through obscurity, which is what Diebold et al were trying to accomplish, doesn’t work. Once a hidden vulnerability gets let out of the bag, it’s no longer hidden, and anyone wth sufficient gumption and lack of morals can exploit it.
No, the problem isn’t with the machines, per se. It’s with the design and implementation of the machines, some of which admittedly may very well have been done on purpose (or at least allowed to happen).
I like this idea. There are definitely advantages to the touch screens — and the electronic voter rolls we’ve had in Maryland have been a blessing (at least after they started working!), because you wouldn’t beleive how common it is for someone to end up in the wrong polling place… in the past, all the judges could say was “you’re not on our rolls.” Now they can say, “Oh, you’re supposed to be over at the Methodist Church on Cameron Street….” and most of the time, the voter left happily to go vote in the right precinct.
The screens are a lot easier for voters to deal with. The question is accountability — and popping out a printed record that could be verified (and used for recounts) would be a good approach. Plus a random 10-15% (or something appropriate) auditing of machine-versus-receipt results, just to make sure things were honest.
Maybe before 2012 we can get some more transparent and verifiable election procedures set up…. with the right Congress and President.
I’m with you, Omir. I want BOTH. Hand counts AND machine counts. I witnessed a hand count at my delegate caucus, and it had some bumps there would have been no way to rectify without a full recount. Fortunately, the margins of victory of the winners were such that the bumps wouldn’t have made a difference. But if they had, it would have been great to run it through a machine as well as count by hand. The machine wouldn’t have ‘lost track’ or been distracted, as the humans were several times.
ROTFLMAO!!!!! I love it!!!!