I don't know about your states, but in mine, at least in my county (Josephine County, Oregon), we have this wonderful method of voting. It's called vote by mail (VBM). Supposed to get more people to vote, because they can vote in the privacy of their own homes, not have to drive the two or three miles to their voting places, and "have time to research the issues at their leisure, instead of having to do this while sitting in the voting booth.

Irrespective of the fact that, if a person can't be bothered with driving to the polls, they probably won't be bothered with researching the candidates and issues. Irrespective of the fact that a person can easily do the research at their leisure, and take a list of how they're going to vote with them when they go to the polls, there are several serious issues which make VBM an open invitation to fraud:

Our county clerk gets 5000 blank ballots to play with for a couple or three weeks, "in case there are a bunch of late registrations". This in a county of 75000! Who can say what happens with these ballots?

Lots of people (at least 4000 in this election, statewide) vote more than once, since the voting registrations aren't cleaned up that often, and ballots are forwarded to peoples' new addresses.

We mark our ballots in number two pencil--the only thing the sanners can read. This leads to some other potential problems:

The county clerk and her helpers have to "fill in" the little ovals which aren't completely filled in by the voters, in order to make the machine happy. They also have to erase any "smudges" on the ballots, so as to not trick the machines. Also, if someone has erased his vote, to change to another candidate/issue, the clerk and her gang place a little white sticker over the erased oval, again to not trick the machine. So here we have all these people in this little office, erasing like mad, writing in number two pencil like mad, and sticking these little "white out" stickers all over the place. Doesn't take a genius to see the implicaion here.

In addition, each and every ballot has to have its signature verified after all the ballots are in. Who can say that they are really the signatures of the voters who allegedly signed them? The clerk and her helpers aren't exactly hand writing experts.

Washington State reports that their recount of their punch card ballots indicated that the punch card was more accurate than the scanned ballots. On the order of a tenth of a percent or less, if memory serves.

This is for your information only, but think about it when your state asks you to approve VBM.

JOJ

-- Anonymous, December 09, 2000

Answers

JOJ:

After reading all of these various procedures (none of which look like the ballot I filled out), I'm seriously wondering if ballots are designed to *maximize* the amount of skulduggery that can be done, by making it as easy as possible for even dumb people to do quickly. I can just picture the manager of the ballot-design department saying "Nope, try again. That design is too hard to invalidate."

-- Anonymous, December 09, 2000

Flint,

All elections in a democracy are going to depend, at least in some small part, on the good ol' honor system: people being basically honest enough to do the right thing, even when no one is looking very closely.

But if a group of people -- any group, of any political persuasion -- should decide that the end justifies the means, and that they are therefore right to manipulate things, the system breaks down.

It's not possible to legislate morality.

-- Anonymous, December 11, 2000

Just like when the Republican Party thought nothing of sending Michael Leach to tamper with Seminole county absentee ballot applications for 15 days in a room alone? Oh no, nothing wrong there. Did he need help? course not, what is wrong with working him 12 hours a day, for two weeks?

What else would the Northern Florida Director of the Republican Party have to do two weeks before a Presidential Election anyhow? Not like it is busy or anything. No organizing, directing volunteers, or button pushing could have possibly been needed at this time, oh no<< <<>>>

-- Anonymous, December 11, 2000

Stephen:

I'm not trying to legislate morality here, and I agree that given motive, method and opportunity, any election can be compromised.

But I sincerely believe that none of these applied here. Nobody deliberately produced ambiguous ballots, but I'm sure some people did so indavertently. As you said yourself, votomatic machines are lousy.

We need standardized ballots, standardized equipment (even if the "equipment" is a #2 pencil), and some testing of random groups to help design as much as possible a clear, unambiguous ballot on which a vote for or against anyone or anything is as difficult as possible to interpret as something not intended by the voter.

We do this kind of thing to develop GUI's. We have randomly selected users, hidden cameras, the works. If we can do this for Windows, why can't we do this for Presidential elections?

Doc:

That moon has set. You need to howl at a new one now.

-- Anonymous, December 11, 2000