The Free Beacon points out that registration and turnout both increased under Secretary of State Kemp -- now Governor-Elect Kemp.
OK. Fair enough. The real problem with the system wasn't registration, though: it was the ultra-hackable computers with no way to verify that your vote had been counted, or that it hadn't been altered. I don't think Kemp cheated, because if he had the margin would have been safer: if he had given himself 51% instead of 50.3%, there would have been no talk of a runoff and a lot less pressure toward a recount. The duty of the Secretary of State isn't satisfied simply by not cheating, though: he ought to have done his best to set up a system that no one thought you could cheat.
5 comments:
The duty of the Secretary of State...he ought to have done his best to set up a system that no one thought you could cheat.
There's no reason to believe he didn't so try. Even a best effort by a best man, though, is a difficult, if not impossible, standard (which doesn't mean it ought not be striven for). That best effort by the best man will be called dishonest by another man, and that other man always exists.
Abrams clearly demonstrated that, as did Sherrod Brown.
Eric Hines
"There's no reason to believe he didn't so try."
Well, yes, there is: he was sued over the obvious weaknesses in the system and, before the case could be heard, the relevant servers got wiped. That looks to me like a confession of guilt, but it is at least 'reason to believe that he didn't try as hard as possible' to build a system people would think was secure.
It would be hard to have come up with a system that people were more likely to suspect, actually. You were given a plastic card with a magnetic strip on it as your ballot. Others had used it before you, and others would use it after you. You plugged it into a machine, touched the screen to vote, and then the 'ballot' allegedly recorded your choices. You couldn't tell, though, because it was just the same unmarked plastic card as before. You'd hand it in, and it would be put into another machine that allegedly recorded the choices allegedly recorded on it, then wiped it for re-use.
So there was no way to know if it recorded your vote, no way to know if the other machine accurately received what you couldn't even be sure had been recorded in the first place, and no way to do a real recount. Even if the servers and machines hadn't also proven to be extremely easy to hack, you'd have no reason to believe in the system he set up.
But they did also prove to be very easy to hack. And he knew that, having been sued over it, and used the same system for his own election to governor.
Compare with the systems in use in North and South Carolina. They're similar touch-screen voting systems with electronic transmission, but they also print out a paper receipt showing the votes. These are stored inside the machines and retained by the voting officers, but they scroll by a plexiglass window as you vote so that you can see that at least the paper ballot recorded your vote accurately. Then, if there were a recount, you'd be able to establish if the electronic count really matched how people had voted, or if the totals had been hacked. That's a pretty good system, if you must have an electronic ballot.
I think he's quite culpable for failure to perform adequately as SoS. But I also think that he didn't cheat.
He was sued by the usual gang of...persons...whose avocation is to squawk over efforts to have prospective voters show in the most minimal way that they are who they claim to be and so eligible actually to vote--in other words, neither the suit nor the suers had credibility, except in the eyes of activist judges.
Which actually lends weight to your note that the server wipe is damning. But by itself, not dispositive. I'd have to know, first, what efforts were made to recover the data from the wiped servers. It's almost impossible to destroy data by wiping; the disks generally have to be physically destroyed. The effort to recover is on the investigators--including those suers' forensic experts--and the judges involved to grant access to both parties to the litigation so the investigation can proceed. How hard did they try, really?
Eric Hines
Just to be clear, this wasn't related to voter identification, but to the security of the machines themselves. There's a story about it here. All they were asking for was paper ballots, not an end to any requirements for identification or registration.
Yes, the two matters are different from each other, but it was the same gang doing the suing.
Eric Hines
Post a Comment