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Some responses from OpEdNews readers to "A bit of a quandary"

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Joan Brunwasser
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I am happy to report a number of responses to my March 31st OpEd piece "A Bit of A
Quandary"
.
I expect that more will be coming and I will print them as well. You don't
have to love my writing style in order to get posted. I'm interested in
reactions to the contents. This is all about getting a real conversation going
on these very important issues. Climb aboard! This is how democracy works.

***

Reading your article I am reminded of this: That every cloud has its
silver lining. One thing we have learned from Bush is that we all
know now that probably 200 Million Americans could have done a
better job at being President of the United States than he has done
or is doing. Any honest person would surely have brought more
honor to our country than he and his cabal have done.

By the same token, it seems to me that you have done a very laudable
job at your post. Your oped piece speaks for itself. I'm not sure what
your mandate was, but I think you have taken the time to learn the ropes
and probably now possess more expertise on the topic than 99% of the
population.

I have no expertise in these matters, but as a matter of common sense, if I
were in a position to make the decision on voting procedures, first I would
advocate for IRV(ed: instant runoff voting). Until that came about I would not
consider buying any
machine that couldn't produce a well tested paper trail and even if I were
able to find such an item I probably would seek to hold at least one or two
elections where voters would vote using two systems side by side.
e.g., use a computer; have the computer print out a receipt showing the
votes that were made; and perhaps run the receipt through an optical
scanner. If the scan count and the computer tally were the same, I
might go ahead and approve the computer system. Like you said, voting
is the foundation of our Democracy. Now that it's broken we're obviously
in deep trouble. I can't understand why any honest person would accept
anything but a foolproof, well tested system.

Anyway, thanks for the great job you're doing. As far as I can tell,
you're doing just fine. Keep up the good work.

Mark Goldman, author and activist

***


From: John Gideon of VotersUnite and VoteTrustUSA

Excellent job! Bravo! This should be a must
read for all of us who have made up our minds
about "how it should all work" which is going to
be different with each of us. You bring it all together. Thank you.


***

I will take a line or two explaining my thoughts. And by the way, I did a lot of
work with computers in the past, got my start in about 1968 in graduate school.

These are facts for me.

1. Hand counting ballots has had so many problems over the years that I am very
leery of any HCPB solution that does not include a full description of the whole
process with emphasis on essential security requirements that need to accompany
it. At least a few have thought about this, but by not making it part of the
proposed solution, HCPB takes on the false aura of a fail-safe system.

2.Computer counted ballots can be not only fast, but 100% accurate. All those
computer programs I wrote in the 1960s were written on punch cards, exactly like
the ones we use for voting and there was never an incident of a punchcard being
misread. And in all the years and all the calculations I have done on a
computer, they have never made a mistake. All the mistakes were my programing
errors. Or engineer design problems etc.

What solution fits these facts?

I can't throw out the computer as a bad option and I can't simply adopt HCPB as
a good option. The best option I know of doesn't get much mention, probably
because it is not quite ready.

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Joan Brunwasser is a co-founder of Citizens for Election Reform (CER) which since 2005 existed for the sole purpose of raising the public awareness of the critical need for election reform. Our goal: to restore fair, accurate, transparent, secure elections where votes are cast in private and counted in public. Because the problems with electronic (computerized) voting systems include a lack of (more...)
 

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