DebateGate

http://www.aniboom.com/video/296934/E.T.A./

2 States Plan to Ditch Electronic Machines, Part of a Rapid National Reversal
By Christian Davenport
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 30, 2008; B01

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Goodbye, electronic voting. Farewell, fancy touch screen. Maryland and Virginia are going old school after Tuesday's election.

Maryland will scrap its $65 million electronic system and go back to paper ballots in time for the 2010 midterm elections -- and will still be paying for the abandoned system until 2014. In Virginia, localities are moving to paper after the General Assembly voted last year to phase out electronic voting machines as they wear out.

It was just a few years ago that electronic voting machines were heralded as a computerized panacea to the hanging chad, a state-of-the-art system immune to the kinds of hijinks and confusion that some say make paper ballots vulnerable. But now, after concern that the electronic voting machines could crash or be hacked, the two states are swinging away from the systems, saying paper ballots filled out by hand are more reliable, especially in a recount.

The trend reflects a national movement away from electronic voting machines. About a third of all voters will use them Tuesday, down from a peak of almost 40 percent in 2006, according to Election Data Services, a Manassas-based consulting firm specializing in election administration. Every jurisdiction that has changed election systems since 2006 has gone to paper ballots read by optical scan machines, said Kimball Brace, the firm's president. And for the first time in the country's history, fewer jurisdictions will be using electronic machines than in the previous election, he said.

"The battle for the hearts and minds of voters on whether electronic systems are good or bad has been lost," Brace said. The academics and computer scientists who said they were unreliable "have won that battle."

The District has one electronic machine in every precinct. But most people vote on paper ballots, said Dan Murphy, a spokesman for the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics.

In Virginia, the law passed last year prohibits localities from purchasing more electronic machines, also known as direct-recording election machines. It could take years to completely switch to paper.

"I think there's a concern that . . . the votes may not be counted correctly," said state Del. Timothy D. Hugo (R-Fairfax). "And with the [machine] there is no backup, and I think that's the greatest concern."

But the move has perplexed some experts who say that after using the electronic touch screens for several elections now, voters have gotten used to them. People use touch-screen machines for many things, such as ordering at McDonald's and taking money out of the bank, and should, advocates say, be able to vote on them.

"We're going to discard tens of millions of dollars to go to a system that is less accurate and secure," said John Willis, an elections expert who was secretary of state under former Maryland governor Parris N. Glendening (D). "The proper question is security and safeguards. It's not to go backwards into the 19th century with paper."

Others, such as Fairfax County General Registrar Rokey W. Suleman II, say there are pluses and minuses with both systems. The touch screens, he said, are easy to use and clearly mark voters' intent. By contrast, voters don't always make their mark definitive on a paper ballot.

But in Virginia and Maryland, the electronic machines don't print a piece of paper that voters can check to make sure their vote was recorded correctly. And that, critics say, means there can't be a reliable recount. Another problem with the electronic machines is that only one person at a time can vote on them. That can make voting take longer, a concern when officials are predicting record turnout Nov. 4.

Paper ballots, which are fed into an optical scan machine that reads them, can help lines move much more quickly because many voters can fill them out at once, officials say. Fairfax has already purchased optical scan machines to back up its touch screens. And on Election Day, elections officers will urge people to vote with paper ballots, Suleman said.

"If voters want to go off in a corner with a clipboard, they can," he said. Otherwise, they'd have to wait for an electronic machine to open up.

During in-person absentee voting in Arlington County, General Registrar Linda Lindberg tried to steer voters toward paper ballots to keep lines moving. But they were "overwhelmingly choosing the machines," she said. "That worries me a little bit about Election Day."

In Maryland, Linda H. Lamone, administrator of the State Board of Elections, has made her preference for touch-screen machines clear, saying in the past that she has "complete faith in the system" and that the machines are "fabulous."

But last year, the General Assembly voted unanimously to discard the touch-screen machines and go to paper ballots by 2010.

It won't be cheap.

The $65 million for the touch-screen machines -- the cost for hardware alone; maintenance costs could add millions more -- was financed through the state Treasurer's Office. While the state continues to pay for the electronic system, switching to paper ballots could cost as much as $40 million by 2011, according to the legislation.

"It makes a person scratch their head and wonder what's going on," said Willis, the former secretary of state. "It's not logical."

But proponents of paper ballots say it's worth it, especially given the fact that the current system doesn't have a voter-verifiable paper trail that can be counted manually in a disputed election.

Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) supported the legislation because "he wanted a way to manually go back and verify the votes," said spokesman Shaun Adamec. "We couldn't go back and do a manual recount now. We don't have the tools to do that."

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/29/AR2008102904105.html

http://sendables.jibjab.com/view/plF3WrlQSnmbLGt9

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An open letter to the local daily paper -- almost every local daily paper in America:
 
I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.
 
This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere.  It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.
 
It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.
 
What is a risky loan?  It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.
 
The goal of this rule change was to help the poor -- which especially would help members of minority groups.  But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay?  They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house -- along with their credit rating.
 
They end up worse off than before.
 
This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it.  One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules.  The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.
 
Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans.  (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me.  It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)
 
Isn't there a story here?  Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout?  Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefitting
personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?
 
I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt.  Or "Fannie-gate."
 
Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even
further in promoting subprime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.
 
As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled Do Facts Matter? "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago.  So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President.  So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."
 
These are facts.  This financial crisis was completely preventable.  The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party.  The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.
 
Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie.  Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!
 
What?  It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?
 
Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.
 
And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.
 
If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.
 
But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign -- because that campaign had sought his advice -- you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.
 
You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.
 
If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.
 
If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.
 
There are precedents.  Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension -- so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link.  (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)
 
If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.
 
Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth.  That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.
 
But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie -- that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans.  You have trained the American people to blame everything bad -- even bad weather -- on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.
 
If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth -- even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.
 
Because that's what honorable people do.  Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences.  That's what honesty means. That's how trust is earned.
 
Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one.  He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time -- and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.
 
Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter -- while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.
 
So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all?  Do you even know what honesty means?
 
Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?
 
You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women.  Who listens to NOW anymore?  We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.
 
That's where you are right now.
 
It's not too late.  You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.
 
If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.
 
Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door.
 
You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis.  You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.
 
This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.
 
If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe --and vote as if -- President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.
 
If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats -- including Barack Obama -- and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans -- then you are not journalists by any standard.
 
You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a daily newspaper in our city.

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http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2008-10-05-1.html

After over two years, let's start up the weekly chat.

I've setup a chat area on "ChatNet" for us. I've reserved a room name so that others cannot come and trash us.

List of software for use with Internet Relay Chat (IRC) servers
List of ChatNet servers

Once you've installed some IRC software, you can test your connection to any of the ChatNet servers (all of them will carry the channel, and relay the chat between the various servers). Once you've connected to the server, the channel name is #3DHS - typically type "/join #3DHS" and it should log you into the channel. Also, you can try registering your preferred nickname using their nick registration command, you can get instructions by typing in "/nickserv help register". If someone already has registered your nickname, you'll have to try something else. But once you get it registered, no one will be able to use it (as long as you login at least once every 45 days).

As an alternative to installing IRC software, there is a Java web client at http://chat.chatnet.org/, though I don't know how good it is.

Feel free to test out the features of IRC in the meantime. If you need any help getting setup, let me know. I'm in the room right now (though not always at my desk) so if you want to join early, or you have any questions, just let me know.

Quick, who's the one on the far right? (Book was published 2006, BTW.)