[geeks] YAGCT

[Phil Stracchino]

On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 03:59:43PM -0800, Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Dec 2003, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> > Neither I nor anyone else said that things were perfect 30 years ago.
> > Just that in many ways, they've gotten a lot worse since, and the
> > average voter in the street gives little indication of even *caring*.
> 
> It is a two sided thing, maybe the voters were far more involved 30 years
> ago, I do not know. On the other hand we have now resources to be far
> more informed about issues than voters did 30 years ago.

We have the resources, yes.  We have the resources to do a great many
things that we aren't doing or are doing wrong.  In many cases, the
changes we're making are for the worse -- for example, the move from
paper ballots which, error-prone as they may be, are at least
verifiable, recountable and not trivially falsifiable, to electronic
voting machines which (under the current requirements) are not
verifiable, have no audit trail whatsoever, have no way of performing a
recount, and can be trivially falsified at any of several different
levels.

With paper ballots, both sides screamed that the other had stolen the
Florida election in 2000. With the Diebold voting machines, every state
in the Union could be stolen in 2004 and no-one who wasn't involved
would be any the wiser.


> Also it comes
> with the overall decline in general education of the American public.

You say that like you think it's an accident.  (Or is that being too
cynical?)


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