Air America

[A. Joseph Ross]

On 11 Nov 2004 at 18:50, Daniel Billings wrote:

> We have used voting machines in this country for a hundred years that
> don't produce a paper trail.  New York still uses mechanical voting
> machines where one votes by making ones choices with switches and then
> pulling a lever. Nobody ever complained about the use of these machines. 
> They are mechanical and not run by computers but lots of things can go
> wrong with simple machines.
 
Those machines are an old and simple technology and are highly reliable.  They don't show 
more votes for a candidate than there are voters.  They don't count votes negatively.  And 
they do have control counters to make sure they have been set correctly at the start.   The 
major error comes from the tally of the results from the machines, and that can be 
recounted.  The new technology has a lot of glitches and no way of tracing them.

As an example of what can be detected and fixed with the old voting machines, in the 1970 
race for State Representative in Brookline, John Businger's campaign manager had reports 
from every precinct which, when added up, showed a narrow win.  He was surprised to learn 
that the figures at Town Hall showed a narrow defeat.  

He went to Town Hall and checked his figures against theirs and found that it came down to 
one machine, on which Town Hall's tally showed 5 votes for Businger, but his tally showed 
55 votes.  It then became possible to check the numbers at the back of the machine, which 
did indeed show 55 votes.  And that's how Businger won the first of 14 terms in the 
Legislature.  (His opponent had already finished holding his victory party when he learned the 
news that he hadn't won after all.)

-- 
A. Joseph Ross, J.D.                           617.367.0468
 15 Court Square, Suite 210                 lawyer@attorneyross.com
Boston, MA 02108-2503           	         http://www.attorneyross.com