[ale] Its over. Maybe

[Tejus Parikh]

> First, voting devices should not be monopolized, in the case of the 
> Diebold systems, they are.

> Second, the systems should be reviewed by non-partisan technically 
> capable people.
> 
It all sounds good, but what's a non-partisan third party.  At very
least, the employees or volunteers are going to have a opinion on who
should win, just by their nature of being citizens in this country. 
Therefore, there is always the possibility that they will not disclose a
flaw that could help their candidate win.  Perhaps it is better to have
the two most partisan groups we can find to conduct the study, but
perhaps they won't disclose flaws that didn't record votes for Nader.

Further more, the technically capable part may be in conflict with point
1.  It could be very difficult to find a group of people that are
capable of knowing every in and out of a dozen proprietary systems.

> Third, voting devices such as these should be randomly seized and a 
> complete verification of the system be completed, again by a 
> non-partisan group.  That's to say, they could walk into a polling 
> place, anywhere in this country, select a machine and after protecting 
> the existing votes on that device, proceed to validate and verify that 
> it is functioning correctly.

I have visions of men in black suits busting into a crowded polling
place, knocking over grannies and grandpa's to get to a machine, like
EMT's on TV.  It would be too easy to go to a crowded polling placed
filled with people of a demographic you don't like, in the hopes that
the longer lines that will result from having some machines off-line
causes people to get impatient and go home.

As far as I can tell, from reading this thread, any level of the system
is open for abuse.  I guess at some point, you have to trust somebody.
-- 
Tejus Parikh
tejus at vijedi.net