First Presidential Race to Use Paperless Voting Draws Fear, Protests, Florida Comparisons, ES&S Spokesliars...
By Brad Friedman on 4/4/2007, 3:01pm PT  

Dear People of France: Welcome to our nightmare...

PARIS, April 3 "” For France's Socialists, among others, the coming presidential election could descend into a nightmare like last fall's in Florida.

This is the first presidential election in France to use paperless computer voting. As many as 1.5 million of the 44.5 million registered voters are expected to cast their ballots electronically in more than 80 municipalities around the country.

But with election day less than three weeks away, opposition to the electronic voting machines has grown, in part because a small percentage of them are made by the same American company whose machines were involved in a bitterly disputed Congressional election in Florida last November.

"We have doubts about the reliability of these machines," Gilles Savary, a spokesman for Ségolène Royal, the Socialist Party candidate, said in an interview. "I don't want to lecture America. But we don't want France to fall into the same Kafkaesque balloting as happened in the United States."
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It is not only the Socialists who oppose the use of electronic machines.

Franà§ois Bayrou, the centrist candidate from the Union for French Democracy party, said last month that it was necessary to "stop this evolution and suspend all use" of electronic voting, because the vote would not be completely reliable.

Some smaller party candidates, including those representing the Green and Communist Parties, also are demanding that the machines not be used.

But not to fear, ES&S, just as here in America, is on the job! Spokesholes are standing by, ready to lie in France, as quickly as they do here...

"We have an extreme amount of confidence in our machines in France," said Rob Palmer, director of marketing and communications for ES&S-iVotronic. "Our machines have proven themselves in thousands of elections in the United States and elsewhere."

"Proven themselves"? To be what? Shitty? Uh, yup...Bonne chance, mes amis!

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Article Categories: France