"Rethinking Recounts"

[NVMojo]

January 21, 2005
Now that the dust has settled on the majority of the close elections nationwide, we can see more clearly than ever the most disturbing problem caused by using paperless touchscreen voting machines: the recounts were, to put it bluntly, a charade.

The goal of a recount is to ensure that the voters' intentions were properly recorded and the right person won. That's why we pull out the punch cards and review them for hanging chads, or check optically scanned ballots for stray marks.

But nothing remotely that sensible occured in Washington State, Ohio, or anywhere else that voters used paperless touchscreen machines. Instead, we saw what could accurately be described as a "reprint." Voting officials either fed the same vote data through the same system a second time, or recounted the machine data by hand or with a spreadsheet -- always reaching the same or roughly the same results. It doesn't take a computer genius to recognize that this method of "recounting" is simply a means of replicating any error in vote data that may have existed the first time the votes were tallied.

more...

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/002222.php