But, of course, not enough concerns to actually investigate them.
By Brad Friedman on 11/27/2004, 2:41pm PT  

The New York Times deems to recognize that it just might not be such a great idea to rely on so many untested electronic voting machines created by private, partisan companies using uninspected software with no way to validate the results.

Appropriately enough for The Times their James Fallows column is found on their "Business Section - YOUR MONEY - TECHNO FILES" page of tomorrow's paper.

Not much new offered, just the fact itself that The Times is willing to talk about these issues at all is what's most notable here. A sample...

Four years ago, about one-eighth of all votes for president were cast electronically. This year, nearly a third were. How the system would handle that large increase in scale could not have been tested until the presidency was at stake. Worse, most of the electronic systems are not accountable. When I voted this year, I fed my paper ballot through an optical scanner and into a storage box. In a recount, those ballots could have been pulled out and run through the scanner again. If I had used the touch screen, I would have had no tangible evidence that the vote counted or was recountable.

Is that a problem because the chief executive of Diebold, the largest maker of such systems, is a prominent Republican partisan? No. It's a problem because it defies the check-and-balance logic built into every other electronic transaction.

Very good. Now what are you willing to do, NY Times, to check-and-balance what these computers did not in this year's election? Anything more than simply talking about it?

managing-editor@nytimes.com; executive-editor@nytimes.com; national@nytimes.com; editorial@nytimes.com; oped@nytimes.com; public@nytimes.com; letters@nytimes.com; magazine@nytimes.com; QandA@nytimes.com; washington@nytimes.com; TheBradBlog@cville.com?Subject=Investigate and Report On Voter Irregularity, Mistabulation and Fraud NOW!">Click here to send an email asking them to do so if you haven't already!

(Thanks Desi for the link!)

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