{"id":4364,"date":"2007-04-04T15:01:14","date_gmt":"2007-04-04T22:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bradblog.com\/?p=4364"},"modified":"2007-04-05T03:24:46","modified_gmt":"2007-04-05T10:24:46","slug":"france-fears-american-style-kafkaesque-balloting-on-new-electronic-voting-machines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/?p=4364","title":{"rendered":"France Fears American-Style &#8216;Kafkaesque Balloting&#8217; on New Electronic Voting Machines"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Dear People of France: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/04\/04\/world\/europe\/04france.html?_r=1&#038;oref=slogin\">Welcome to our nightmare&#8230;<\/a><br \/>\n<span class=\"pullquote pqRight\"><!--\"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.\"\u009d--><\/span><br \/>\n<Div class=\"media\">PARIS, April 3 &#8220;\u201d For France&#8217;s Socialists, among others, the coming presidential election could descend into a nightmare like last fall&#8217;s in Florida.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We have doubts about the reliability of these machines,&#8221;\u009d Gilles Savary, a spokesman for S\u00e9gol\u00e8ne Royal, the Socialist Party candidate, said in an interview. &#8220;I don&#8217;t want to lecture America. But we don&#8217;t want France to fall into the same Kafkaesque balloting as happened in the United States.&#8221;\u009d<br \/>\n&#8230;<br \/>\nIt is not only the Socialists who oppose the use of electronic machines.<\/p>\n<p>Fran\u00e0\u00a7ois Bayrou, the centrist candidate from the Union for French Democracy party, said last month that it was necessary to &#8220;stop this evolution and suspend all use&#8221;\u009d of electronic voting, because the vote would not be completely reliable.<\/p>\n<p>Some smaller party candidates, including those representing the Green and Communist Parties, also are demanding that the machines not be used.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>But not to fear, ES&#038;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&#8230;<\/p>\n<div class=\"media\">&#8220;We have an extreme amount of confidence in our machines in France,&#8221;\u009d said Rob Palmer, director of marketing and communications for ES&#038;S-iVotronic. &#8220;Our machines have proven themselves in thousands of elections in the United States and elsewhere.&#8221;\u009d<\/div>\n<p>&#8220;Proven themselves&#8221;? To be what? Shitty? Uh, yup&#8230;Bonne chance, mes amis!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dear People of France: Welcome to our nightmare&#8230; PARIS, April 3 &#8220;\u201d For France&#8217;s Socialists, among others, the coming presidential election could descend into a nightmare like last fall&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[242],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-4364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-france"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4364\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4364"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=4364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}