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Hahaha Mario you kill me. A GOP shill complaining about institutional election fraud? I wonder if you have any idea how ironic that sounds.
Using paper ballots definitely does create some problems. The tallying process, for example, is much slower than with electronic systems.
But the trend has been away from using DREs in recent years because of widely documented malfunctions and meltdowns with these machines during the 2004 and 2006 elections. Also, numerous computer scientists have revealed huge security flaws with purely electronic voting systems. So, for those of us who care about the integrity of election administration in this country, paper ballots have become a necessity, despite associated problems.
By the way, Mario's quote at the end of his blog doesn't make any sense: "We know that there was fraud, or at the very least incompetence, because of the electronic record of the votes." Actually, we know there was incompetent (and possibly fraudulent) election administration in the precincts with the missing ballots, because the actual paper ballots were missing from the unlocked ballot boxes.
Steven Robert Allen
Executive Director
Common Cause New Mexico
Steve,
Our financial system is run electronically without "huge security flaws." So, there is no reason to believe that the same can't be done for voting.
As to the sense of that last paragraph, The electronic count did not agree with the number of paper ballots. That's how they knew there was an error. Paper did nothing to improve the integrity of the process. Remember, "hanging chads" were a product of paper not electronic voting.
The GOP's cozy relationship with Diebold and other manufacturers of electronic balloting systems and those same companies refusal to do anything about their systems lack of security (Diebold actually uses an unencrypted MS Access .mdb file to store votes on individual machines!) have rendered electronic balloting systems unusable. Until governments stop giving favorable treatment to companies like Diebold who have vast, easily exploitable security flaws and refuse to take even the simplest steps to improve them, I'll stick with paper ballots.
Your statement about electronic finances hit the point exactly: would banks tolerate the pathetically insecure nature of Diebold balloting systems? Of course not, which is why the ATMs that Diebold makes (they make the majority of the ATMs in the country) are essentially unhackable. Yet somehow they can't figure out how to not store ballots in a DB that most middle schoolers know how to gain access to and manipulate.
Election fraud is really not something that your party holds the high ground on Mario, you really might want to try to find another wedge issue. Then again, your party doesn't really hold the high ground on anything these days, does it?
Mario, your first point is correct, in a sense. It's probably possible to create secure electronic voting systems, it's just that existing electronic voting systems have been proven, again and again, to not be secure.
Your second point is just wrong. I've talked to everyone involved. The irregularity in those two Cibola County precincts was discovered because the ballot boxes from those precincts were unlocked and ALL of the paper ballots were missing. Later, the recount was accomplished by using the tabulation on the memory cards from the optical scanners. There's no way to know whether "the electronic count did not agree with the number of paper ballots" because the paper ballots are still missing. That's why the attorney general is investigating this.
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