Reply #8: E voting problems continue to receive world wide attention

[JohnyCanuck]

A columnist from Today's Daily Nation of Barbados quotes excerpts from another Guardian article on electronic voting and derides the US government's hypocrisy in proclaiming support for democracy abroad while apparently not giving a whit that it is being snuffed out at home.

US Impacts
by Peter Morgan

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Their (i.e. hanging chads /jc)importance was amply illustrated by the fact that they caused the election of the President of the United States to be left in the hands of a politically biased Supreme Court which handed the victory to Mr George Bush by a 5-4 majority. Since that time, Dubya and his pals have never ceased to preach the gospel that free and fair elections are the very bedrock of a democracy. Since no Weapons of Mass Destruction have been found in Iraq, the official American justification for the pre-emptive attack, killing thousands and costing the American people billions, has now been changed to have been the imposition of such a democracy. Guess by whom!

There is another election coming up in November and no doubt the world is hoping that they might use rather more conventional methods of determining the wishes of the voters on this occasion. It seems this is not so but, in view of the fact that nothing has been mentioned on the subject by our local news media, I believe it worthwhile to use this week’s column to reproduce relevant extracts of an article published in the British newspaper the Guardian -

“United States voters will go to the polls in November using electronic machines that cannot be verified, a computer scientist has warned”. David Gill of Stanford University told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Seattle that 1 600 technologists and 53 elected officials had joined his crusade for a ‘paper trail’ so that voting machines could be checked.

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At the time when there was utter confusion regarding the Florida votes in the 2000 election, President Fidel Castro of Cuba graciously offered to send electoral experts to solve their problem. I hope someone has alerted him that his offer may yet be needed.

US Impacts