Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

vvalkyri just posted a New York Times editorial about the danger of electronic voting machines. This shouldn't be news to anyone on LiveJournal at this point -- URLs and text of blogs and online media discussing the problem have been floating around for months -- but I'd wondered why I wasn't hearing about it on the evening news. When a columnist in the NYT writes about it, does that mean folks will start paying attention? I dunno. I hope so.

This isn't just hypothetical "the security and testing aren't good enough" hand-wringing. Anomolous vote counts have happened in real -- not test or demo -- real elections in 2002.

Somebody on my friends list (I meant to keep track, but I also meant to post this the day they did (hey, at least you know it made an impression on me and I'm spreading the meme, right?)) mentioned a link (probably via BoingBoing?) to a page suggesting:

"Avoid the questionable Diebold machines. Register as an absentee voter so that you can have a receipt of your vote. In many states, this takes quite a while so DO IT NOW. [I'll still love you even if you vote for someone i don't like, but i'll be very angry with you for not voting.]"

(The comments on that page have since grown to include links to instructions and deadlines for absentee voting in several states, and a disconcerting observation, that "in most districts absentee ballots are not counted at all unless the vote differential between the top two candidates is less than the number of absentees filed" and "You're not avoiding Diebold by absentee voting; Diebold machines count the mail-ins too. (At least you'll have a paper record, but that's not good enough in my book. We need an open and observable vote-counting system.)", which could be serious flies in the ointment for this idea if true. Ugh.)

MyAbsenteeBallot.com provides a more thorough set of information about casting absentee ballots in various jurisdictions.

I'm not sure which type of voting machine they'll be using in Baltimore. I'd commented that if they use the electronic ones, I'll have to arrange (now) to be out of the state on election day so as to qualify to use an absentee ballot, but that was before I read the comments about whether/how absentee ballots will be counted. (The instructions for Baltimore say an absentee ballot "will be counted" provided that it is recieved on time; nothing about the normal ballotting having to be close... There's still the matter of how they're counted. That they can be verified is good, but only if they will be verified.)

Get people talking about the problem of improper voting machines. I don't think the problem is going to get fixed until enough people make a big enough fuss.