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arbitrary rejection without good sense. Absentee ballots received by an election
commission during a valid time window up to the day of the election should have
been counted whether or not postmarks were visible. Stamping the arrival time
and date should have been sufficient.
The television news services assumed that Florida polls closed at 7 PM .
However, the western Florida panhandle was not in the Eastern time zone and
closed at 8 PM EST . The major networks announced Gore as the winner of Florida
at 7:48 PM . Later interviews in the Panhandle concluded that this error, which was
probably a careless human error, caused about 15,000 voters to go home and not
vote.
The Florida voting mess reached both the Florida Supreme Court and the U.S.
Supreme Court. The final results, after a number of recounts, awarded the state's
electoral college votes, and thereby the national election, to Bush.
This Florida mess was a cautionary tale that elections “by the people” might be
evolving into future elections “by computer software that uses secret and unveri-
fied algorithms that cannot be validated by election officials and votes that cannot
be recounted if they are wrong.”
The bottom line is that computer voting is prone to errors, is fairly easy to hack,
and can modify election results in unknown ways. The lack of paper or independ-
ent backups to validate voting accuracy makes these systems intrinsically unreli-
able.
The current “hot topic” in the area of voting is that of a requirement for voters
to have some form of identification when they arrive at the voting precinct, such
as a driver's license. But a voter ID is only one topic out of a chain of topics that
need to be studied. Truly accurate voting needs to span the entire sequence of the
voting process, which includes the following:
• Voter registration
• Logistics of absentee ballots
• Validation of state and municipal voting lists
• Voter identification when casting a ballot
• Removal of disfranchised voters
• Accuracy of electronic voting machines
• Backup and recount logistics in case of error
• Accuracy of precinct tabulations
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