Hi Doug & Ken :)
    Well... Oregon has a mail in vote system now... and it hasn't had too
many problems...

    There were reports of people collecting the ballots at some of the
county courthouses that were not affiliated with the elections department of
those counties and were just "walking away with ballots" .... You can either
mail in your ballot or drop it off at a collection site... the "Better Half"
and I dropped ours off around the 1st of Nov at the local Library where
there was a locked collection box...

    There are reports of people being registered in multiple counties.... I
know that this was the first election that I didn't get a ballot for
Multnomah *AND* Washington counties!  It only took a couple of years to get
them to fix that one!!!
     The counties are required to submit the voter rolls to an independent
audit before the election, but that is done in the spring before the primary
election and so a less than scrupulous person could then register in
additional counties and it wouldn't be caught until the next election!

     So, no system is perfect and remember there will always be a "Stainless
Steel Rat" in the system... hehe

Art "thats it!  Jim DiGris for President! hehe" Bahrs

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ken Hirsch" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, December 01, 2000 1:22 PM
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] OT: ATM Voting


> There are quite a few potential problems that would need to be overcome.
>
> First, there are problems that are common to all remote voting methods,
> including mail-in voting.
> Security of the ballot--
>   Mail-in votes have to be signed, so there's some evidence in case of
> fraud, although that may be weak.
>   Presumably, you would mail ATM cards and PINs separately, so this would
> provide some security.
>   I think with any kind of remote voting, it's easier to have multiple
fake
> registrations.  If you have to come to a public voting place, you're more
> likely to be caught.
>   Also, vote-buying or coercion would be much easier with remote voting.
At
> a precinct, it's pretty obvious if you round up a bunch of drunks and look
> over their shoulder as they vote.  With remote voting, ...
>
>
> ATM machines are not general-purpose terminals.
>   There's no HTML-forms capability.  Each model of ATM would have to be
> programmed separately for each election.  A technical problem, but not
> insignificant.
>
> Secret Ballot <> Accountability
>     If you keep a secret ballot, how do you know that each stage passes on
> the votes and tallies them properly.  With our current system, votes are
> counted at the precinct level, then the votes are passed on to and tallied
> at higher stages of government.  At the precinct, there are officials from
> both parties.  The totals from each precinct are published so that any
> discrepancies can be found.  How do you know what happens if your
particular
> vote is kept secret.  Did the ATM pass it correctly to the clearinghouse?
> Maybe the programmer made a mistake.  Did the clearinghouse pass it
> correctly to X?  Were they added correctly?  With votes, there are not
> account balances to check.
>
> With our current system, Jeb Bush has very little ability to cause
mischief
> since most of the work is done at the county and precinct level.  Think
how
> much more suspicion there would be if there were no way to see how the
> counting was done and it was all done centrally.
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Doug Becker" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Friday, December 01, 2000 3:23 PM
> Subject: OT: ATM Voting
>
>
> I wanted to find out what you all thought about using ATM Voting for the
> next general election?
>
> Since I work for a County, from my perspective it would be quite cost
> effective for the County and profitable to whoever did the programming.
>
> I am in the process of contacting the National ATM Business Development
> Manager for Bank of America--he's out of the office until next week. The
> good folks at Bank of America are taking this seriously, at least for the
> moment.
>
> You can see more of my proposal at:
>
> http://www.mind-set.com/
>
> [Is Wirt the only one who will understand Schrodinger's Election?]
>
> By the way, if you don't want to use http://www.mind-set.com/ you can
always
> use:
>
> http://www.assertiveincompetence.com/     or
> http://www.assertiveincompetence.net/       or
> http://www.assertiveincompetence.org/