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Originally Posted by Noctis
That seems pretty out of context. As I recall the coverage on this (read about it on MSNBC, I believe), he was saying that their machines would be the ones that would deliver votes for George Bush.
All that is saying is that when people vote for Bush (which they did), the votes would come through their machines.
While they shouldn't be expressing partisan views, the conspiratorial implications are stretched to be generous.
It's the same as Fed-Ex saying they'll be the ones to deliver the votes for Kerry because they'll be shipping the provisional ballots.
He's talking about the functionality of the machines, not programming them to vote for Bush.
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[Disjointed Rant]
I agree that it could be taken either way, and your Fed-Ex analogy is a good one. Of course we can’t expect everyone working at the companies in question to be impartial, that’d be unrealistic, but while the code that works the machines is unavailable to the people of the United States, and the programming community as a whole, to view and analyse, alarm bells should be ringing. Diebold have already been caught using uncertified software in California (2002 I think) and I for one wouldn’t trust them as far as I can piss into a gale force wind. I really can’t work out the logic behind giving 5 private companies complete control over a large section of the voting process, to me that seems foolish, if not reckless. It’s wide open to abuse. If I was American I’d be writing a letter to my current elected representative(s), urging him/her/them to look into this whole voting machine situation. In order to make the voting process over there more transparent and more secure, the proprietary code used within the machines of the 5 companies in question should be replaced with open source code. (Or just make the current code available for everyone to view.)
Whenever the topic of machine voting comes up online (elsewhere), it seems to descend into a Republican vs Democrat issue. Republicans shouldn’t have a problem with opening up the software’s code because if the code’s clean it’ll prove that wins in 2000, 2002 and 2004 were genuine. And if the code’s clean then the Democrats will have to stfu and take the results on the chin. The reason why people are starting to question the validity of results from the various different types of voting machines isn’t due to Democrat “sour grapes”, it’s because whenever “errors” or “computer glitches” are discovered 9/10
* they go in favour of Republican candidates. For the sake of “Democracy” the people of the US of A should do their best to dump these machines for 2006 and go back to the simple pen and paper ballots, like we use here in the UK.
[/Disjointed Rant]
*No stats to back this up other than to say that the results of the elections for 2000, 2002, and 2004 are available online for anyone, Democrat or Republican, to analyse for “errors”. From what I’ve read online and seen/heard on the mainstream media the vast, vast majority of “glitches” go in favour of Republican candidates. And remember I'm impartial in all this, so that isn't an anti-Republican statement. eek:
ps: geRV calmdown: