[edshuck]

We have an interesting situation.

A member of the Board of Supervisors has proposed that all pesons with school age children be allowed to vote for school issues.

Sounds simple. Now for the twist.

The City and County is a "sanctuary" for illegal immigrants.People entering illegally from wherever are allowed to remain. The police, by direction of the board denies them the authority to report an individual to immigration.

So we end up with a large population of illegals.

They then send for the family and settle in for 30 to 40 years and then retire to Mexico or wherever.

They may make up as much as 30% of the vote.

I am curious as to your input.

Folks west of twin peaks. White anglo straight are probably keeping tar pots hot and lots of feathers in hopes of trapping the supervisor who made the proposal. Chinese vote and may be the swing to defeat the measure. Gays, generally will not care. Blacks have a low turnout and after Florida in 2000 who can blame them.

[trogg]

First question,
Is the election going to be run on those "interesting" Diebold electronic voting machines?
As I understand they are the ones that have been know to count more votes than there are people registered to vote in that electorate / area.

[edshuck]

There is some kind of directive from the administration that they are to be used.

We may not see them in California. Kevin Shelly, secretary of state has called a halt to them or sued someone.

There have been a couple of trials and one counted all Bush votes twice and Kerry once for every two votes. Then some teenager hacked in and Kerry won.

Oh, gosh, I don't know. If it is faulty and costs mor we will probably buy them, but only if they are from India and have no instruction booklets.

The current voting machine is refed to as the "shreader" by the poll workers.

[Penny]

How are our votes counted?? I was asking someone else here too, and they don't know either.

[trogg]

Originally Posted by Penny

How are our votes counted?? I was asking someone else here too, and they don't know either.

I think kiwi votes are counted manually at major polling booths as there is only a million or so of them (two million max) given the usual voter turnout.
The official site isn't 100% clear on how the counting is done.
http://www.elections.org.nz/esyst/elect_night.html

The point to note with Kiwi elections is that the counting is open to scrutiny because of the way the voter's names are checked off the electoral rolls and the votes are effectively numbered and that (MOST IMPORTANTLY) the paper votes are able to be recounted.

Originally Posted by edshuck

The current voting machine is refed to as the "shreader" by the poll workers.

Is that because of the way there is no audit trail that will allow for a manual recount?

As I understand with the help of the kiwi website that broke the story & Bev Harris' research http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00065.htm & http://scoop.co.nz/mason/features/?s=usacoup
the Diebold voting machines are basically personal computers running the ultra secure Micro$oft Windows (NOT!) and some 'special' counting software.
The vote is then written into an online internet file which can be edited (if you crack the password using something like www.lostpassword.com) by anybody who knows where the file is kept and the vote count altered.

And the one that amuses me the most and scares me because they got away with it is this; http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00064.htm

November 2002, Comal County, Texas - A Texas-sized lack of curiosity about discrepancies: The uncanny coincidence of three winning Republican candidates in a row tallying up exactly 18,181 votes each was called weird, but apparently no one thought it was weird enough to audit. Conversion to alphabet: 18181 18181 18181 ahaha ahaha ahaha

Sometimes I think we are lucky to live in this backwater country at the end of the earth and away from MOST of the corruption and dodgy dealings that run the economy of this planet behind the scenes.
Although another day I will share my experiences with NZ Military & Government cover ups that even saw a high court judge issue an "interesting" verdict which was against the evidence presented.