Reply #79: fixing the voting process

[ngant17]

Voting should be considered as a mass-production and
manufacturing process which leads to a final product,
democracy.  If our final product is a “democracy”, then some
kind of quality control
or quality assurance needs to be applied to the process of
voting which essentially manufactures our democracy.

In the same way that the machinery must be calibrated and
set-up correctly prior to beginning the manufacturing process,
statistical process control(SPC)  is an integral part of that
manufacturing
process - and it is an ongoing activity, before, during and
after -  we ought to think the same way about the election
process which produces our democracy.

We already have some rudimentary forms of quality control in
place, such as:

Before voting: ID verification
During voting: done by individual, checking selections for
errors
after voting: exit polling, random sampling.

There are many processes involved here.  It is a complex
operation.  But since the 2000 presidential elections, and the
2004 one as well, it is obvious that the current methodologies
of quality control for voting are insufficient.  To begin
with, there are no paper trails with the BBV(black box
voting), the programming code cannot be independently
examined, and there are security flaws that can be exploited. 


Even worse, allowing private corporations to monopolize the
voting machines, the same ones who maintain a conflict of
interest with respect to the candidates running for office, it
 is no
different than allowing the wolves to guard the chicken coop. 
Or, to put it another way, would Ford want to produce a
vehicle to compete against GM, when it had to depend on GM to
run their assembly line?  Why should we want anything less for
ourselves?  We the people need to
control the assembly line, the voting process and the voting
machines, because we are responsible for its final product, a
functional democracy. As it stands now, private companies
control our
“assembly line”, and we’re letting them produce a political
Edsel for us, and they’re pretending it’s the best model in
the world.

It should be apparent with the current voting methods that we
have a long way to go before we can produce a decent “widget”
that works, that is to say, a democracy that functions
according the design of its original blueprint, the US
Constitution.  Until the election process can be based on
simple rational and unbiased scientific methods, we are going
nowhere and it could even turn into something worse than a
defective product: fascism or a corporate dictatorship!