Cannabidraake turned on the Etch-A-Sketch and wrote:
> In news:alt.drugs.pot, nowhere@
nobody.com posted on Mon, 15 Sep 2008
> 23:30:42 -0500:
>
>> The electoral congress are the electors you vote for when you
>> "vote for president"... they're seldom congressmen/women.
>
> My question is why, in this age of electronics, can we not vote over
> the internet and just get rid of an electoral college whose initial
> usefulness has been superceded by technology?
1. Because a large portion of the population doesn't have intraweb. They
already scream about voter defranchising by requiring them to actually
either mail a ballot (which can be done) or going into a polling place.
2. Because there's not as much a guarantee of anonymity. Supposedly your
vote is secret. (However, we can very much tell who voted for whom in a
given precinct if we wanted to.
> If you're going to have
> fraud on voting machines, why not just let the fraud happen over the
> internet?
Fraud on the machines is actually extremely difficult, no matter what the
terrorist kooks try to say.
I loved this article:
http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~seclab/projects/voting/ and
the accompying video.
They even go so far to say that we could hack the tally machines.
(Nevermind that the tally machines are in a room with video surveillance,
locked with only limited card-key access, not on our LAN, and are reset
before the election.)
One thing I love about this is that they neglect the Logic and Accuracy
tests we run before and after the tally process. We create ballots with
pre-selected results, run them through the tally machines and determine if
the results match on all 18 machines.
> It would save all of us the hassle of having to go out on
> election day, thereby saving carbon emissions going to and from the
> voting booth on a cold engine.
>
>> Some even have voted for candidates OTHER than the one they were
>> "pledged" too... this is how the Libertarian Party got votes in
>> the Electoral College, Republican Electors voting for the
>> Libertarian Candidate.
Yes, that portion is fucked up. Nothing we can do there.
