Happy New Year

Was Franken the one who gave Andy "The Last Name is Quite Appropriate" Dick a well-deserved punch?

"I'm not a member of any organized political party. I'm a Democrat." -- Will Rogers

I wonder why the Republicans never ran Larry The Cable Guy?

He's too intellectual?

"I'm not a member of any organized political party. I'm a Democrat." -- Will Rogers

Yeah, it's almost as crazy as Ronald Reagan as President, or Hulk Hogan as Governor of Minnesota (or was that somebody else?), or Sarah Palin one heartbeat away from the presidency.

And the recount has been a joke.

There has to be a better word than recount. Maybe revote?

(link...)

Mr. Franken started the recount 215 votes behind Senator Coleman, but he now claims a 225-vote lead and suddenly the man who was insisting on "counting every vote" wants to shut the process down. He's getting help from Mr. Ritchie and his four fellow Canvassing Board members, who have delivered inconsistent rulings and are ignoring glaring problems with the tallies.

Under Minnesota law, election officials are required to make a duplicate ballot if the original is damaged during Election Night counting. Officials are supposed to mark these as "duplicate" and segregate the original ballots. But it appears some officials may have failed to mark ballots as duplicates, which are now being counted in addition to the originals. This helps explain why more than 25 precincts now have more ballots than voters who signed in to vote. By some estimates this double counting has yielded Mr. Franken an additional 80 to 100 votes.

Kenny shoots, scores!
NOBODY who voted for Dubya should ever, ever, ever have the right to call anybody an idiot.
Unless they're trying to prove that it takes one to know one.

Even if true, Franken would still have won, no? 225-100=125.

manifest election fraud you take the simple approach and say ,"Well, Franken is still ahead"?

How much election fraud does there have to be?

This is a case where a special election is in order.

I wouldn't use the WSJ ed page on my ass for fear that its slurs and smears would leave more dingleberries than when I started. (The rest of the paper is quite good.)

Liberty and justice for all.

My home

Hell, no. That was too important for even a week's delay to get it right.

Liberty and justice for all.

My home

I don't agree. This election in fact proves the exact opposite. Among roughly 2.5 million ballots cast, the campaigns challenged about 6700 - less than an 0.3% alleged error rate, which is waaay lower than many traditional forms of voting, maybe even including an initial hand-count of paper ballots. The Minnesota recount even included lots of ballots whose voters, couldn't follow directions but did clearly express their intent. Most of the challenges were bullshit anyway.

The problem with the Diebold optical scan is not in the scanner; it's in the hackability of the system. Even so, the paper ballots are still there to be hand-counted if necessary.

Liberty and justice for all.

My home

I guess there are always people too addled or feeble to mark any kind of ballot correctly, though.

Exactly. Some people think you are supposed to put an X through the circle, and some lack the dexterity to stay within the lines. The most controversial MN ballots have both a filled in circle and an X through it. Was the X intended to cancel the vote or emphasize it? In some cases there were marks for other candidates, other times not.

According to some reports, the canvassing board was inconsistent in interpreting such ballots, but given the transparency of the recount process, I tend to doubt the credibility of the reports. I would love to see some analysis of this recount process from a voting rights advocacy group.

I agree with MDB (or was it LL?) about voter-verified paper receipts being a critical component to a reliable system, and we should also demand open-source, checksum-verified software.

.. which is why it will never happen. :)

Much of this exists now with this exact optical scan technology. I've used a touch screen voting machine from the same product line whose output is a paper ballot. Its intended user is someone who's too infirm to get the ovals filled correctly. I used it because the deputy warden at my precinct is a friend, and she asked me to give it a whirl. In the long run, it would be useful to extend these machines to all voters, but they are more expensive.

It's good but not perfect: The machine asked for confirmation, probably too often. I didn't test undervote or overvote detection, but that could be a benefit of touch screen systems. The output was very slow to generate on the ballot and registration was not perfect but good enough. The defects should be addressed, and there's no technical reason they can't be.

There's no good reason to separate the machine readable ballot from its human readable content. One version of the truth is better.

Keeping such a machine off any network is better. There's less exposure to hacking that way. Instead, the voter takes the generated ballot to the scanner, and it tabulates the votes. There's no reason I can see to release totals before the polls close, but this makes the count available shortly after closing time. There is some reconciliation the poll workers should have to do (e.g. total voters vs. total ballots) before releasing even unofficial results.

As far as I can see, this is the gold standard of current voting technology - at least that I'm aware of. I told my town's Town Clerk just that.

But I am assuming conscientious physical control of memory cards and counting machines.

Liberty and justice for all.

My home

Exactly!

That is correct. Literacy tests were eliminated by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Paper ballots filled out with pens, then?

Don't mistake me, I don't mean the votes of those who are, uh, unfamiliar with how to vote shouldn't be counted. But I do think optical scan proved its abilities in Minnesota. With the addition of the existing ballot-inking machine for the infirm, the optical scan technology would be even better.

Teaching everyone who doesn't know how to fill out a ballot is harder, but it usually doesn't matter. When it does, as in Minnesota, a hand recount is still the way to go, and optical scan ballots are suitably readable both by machine and by eye.

Liberty and justice for all.

My home