Re:Bulls**t (Score 1)

"it's somewhat insulting to elections officials and volunteers," he said to the idea that elections officers would tamper with vote results."

Um... Mr. Bear... Just who do you think has been responsible for vote tampering under previous methods for counting votes ???

Elections officials and their state & county government underlings are the only people with access needed to tinker with vote counts under ANY scheme of balloting present or past. Katherine Harris for example in her elections oversight capacity as Florida Secretary of State was an "elections official." We're supposed to take the word of such people implicitly, and not to question their stewardship over elections to avoid the possibility of that they might take offence? To spare their feelings? The vanity of elections officials is more important than the integrity of democratic elections...wow, who knew?

Mr. Bear doth protest a bit too much over the good name of elections officials. While most poll workers are well intentioned citizens just trying to make their democracy work, some like Chief Justice William Rehnquist have a history of intimidating minority voters and trying to keep them from voting. But even the bad apples among poll workers are out of the loop when it comes to truly systematic, large scale election fraud. Only elections officials can do that. Lumping elections officials who can and sometimes have rigged elections with poll workers, who with a few exceptions are truly public spirited people without any prospect of determining electoral outcomes, is a deliberate trick Bear uses to confuse the issue. The issue though isn't to make a thorogh accounting of who's trustable and who isn't.

The point of any improved system of balloting would be to remove as far as possible ANY reliance upon trust in fallible humans. An improved system would replace blind faith in the word of individuals in power individuals who have a stake in the outcome, and who work out of sight, with visible, unalterable and repeatable processes. And likewise, an improved system would remove reliance and trust as far as possible in any processes where the votes are "handled" out of sight. What a computer does to data on a CPU is as far out of sight as it is possible to get. By contrast, a mechanical system is hard and timeconsuming to change (the key to integrity is the proper collection and custody of the paper ballots, but that is something that is fully visible and thus monitor-able) A fully computerized system on the other hand, can be changed in order to fudge the results, then changed back invisibly in the blink of an eye. Hardcore forensics would be required to even get a sense that something untowards might have happened.

E-balloting as offered by Diebold, ES&S and others, therefore, is the greatest invitation to rigged elections since the invention of standing armies. In that sense, voting technology can be said to be some making scientific progress.I'd rather scratch my candidate's name on rock with a nail than toss my vote into the ether with e-balloting.