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New Jersey Faces Lawsuit Over E-Voting Machines, As They Crash In Florida
from the fun-for-everyone dept
Anyone else get the feeling that this election season isn't going to run all that smoothly? Just hours after Florida opened their early voting booths to reports of crashes and glitches, a group in New Jersey is filing a late lawsuit to try to stop e-voting machines being used in the state. By this point, it's pretty clear that these voting machines are problematic, but why would this particular group wait until two weeks before the election to file this lawsuit? Everyone's known about the problems for months. Holding out and filing now isn't particularly productive. While I still think we'd be better off without these particular machines being used, it would have made a lot more sense if that decision had been made many months ago, rather than throwing the entire process into upheaval right now.
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Time Limit ?
Sorry to Disagree Mike but there's not a time limit on filing lawsuits. A number of things could have gone into the decision, perhaps the most viable being the chance that another state or federal authority would rule favorably in some manner against the e-voting machines. Precedence is all important when bringing a case before the court and if it was available it would make the case for them saving lots of time and money. By going forward now, with out precedence therefore having to set precedence they are pretty much at the mercy of whatever judge they happen to draw.
With it being this late in the process, odds are the case will never be ruled on, much less heard, by the time of the election.
While I'm very much against the over use of the court system in the US I have yet to find a better (think time/money/fair -- emphasis on fair) to replace it.
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I'm a bit confused....
The lottery system is capable of accurately keeping track of millions of numbers chosen from thousands of locations and producing a paper recept of the transaction containing a bar code that uniquely identifies the ticket.
WHY can't the government obtain an electronic voting system that can keep track of 4 or 5 candidates, as many ballot issues, accurately record the results, and produce a bar coded paper recept for the voter? It would seem that getting 40% of any lottery winnings is more valuable to the state than my vote.
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Re: I'm a bit confused....
Lottery systems are very expensive to create and maintain. Most use dedicated telephone lines to send the transactions to the data center, which has to have redundant equipment for everything in order to make sure the whole system doesn't stop due to a single failure. Then add the people to operate the data center, its customer service, the library of archives (tapes or other media), and people who troubleshoot communications problems with the field systems. Which is not to say that the electronic voting systems are cheap, but too many seem to be implemented with a dime-store approach.
I'm sure if the governments collected $1 per vote at the polls they'd be more motivated to invest in a robust real-time system. Sadly the government too often seems to be treating voting as an unavoidable nuisance, rather than the foundation of our system of government.
Also, while the point of the anonymous ballet is understandable, designing a lottery-style system for voting that needs to be auditable BUT anonymous would add some new challenges.
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