Thursday, May 09, 2013

Kena cadangkan cara lain pengundian

Ikuti pertukaran message saya dan teman saya di Columbus, Ohio Amerika Syarikat:

Evan:Is that a photo of a line of voters waiting to cast their ballots? If so, then it would seem that the entrenched powers in Malaysia have been studying the American art of voter suppression.

Me:No Evan.This is the post election rally/gathering to protest against election fraud (as claimed by the opposition party) Just google up Malaysian General Election news for further details

Evan:I'm glad to see people mobilized over the issue of fraud. When we exposed the genuine fraud in the 2004 election we scarcely mustered a few thousand people, nationally. And, now that John Kerry is our Secretary of State he has the gall, and the lack of a sense or irony, to demand that Venezuela conduct a full, nation-wide hand re-count of their paper ballots. He never asked for a recount in the U .S. - not even in Ohio. the Green Party had to demand (and pay for) that recount (which was meaningless, anyway, because in Kerry 's America all of the ballots are electronic and unverifiable. in Mexico, where there was also ample evidence of election fraud in the election prior to this most recent one, and Calderon took office before any recounts had been conducted Obrador supporters demonstrated in Mexico City -2 Million strong!  You may have misgivings (you, collectively, in Malaysia, I mean) about the effectiveness of demonstrating and demanding clean elections, but be grateful that you're not awash in ignorance and apathy as we are in the U.S.

Me:Perhaps we should be thinking hard of an alternative how we elect our leaders...the ballots do not seem to work or subject to abuse....worldwide.The Philippines will have theirs soon.That would be interesting to watch as well.

Evan:Venezuela has the best solution so far. When we were opposing the introduction of highly vulnerable and tamper-prone electronic voting systems in the U.S. we consulted with experts. I came up with an idea for a system wherein the electronic voting machines printed a paper ballot that the voter would verify in the presence of an election supervisor. Two experts told me that my idea was the "only" nearly fool-proof model that could work, but the prevailing wisdom at the time was to support an all-paper system with hand-counting. That was the second best option. Venezuela has a system in place that closely resembles my idea, and they have improved upon that by adding an automatic random audit requirement of more than 50% of their precincts. In Ohio our random audit is only 3% and it only consists of running the memory cartridges from the machines in 3%of the precincts through the same electronic tabulators once more. There are no checks against the tallies being altered at various points along the way as the electronic information from the tabulators travels, by wire, first to a Republican-owned company in Republican-owned Tennessee and then to the Secretary of State. Even the 3%audit is beatable if the machines themselves are programmed with an algorithm that commands them to display correct results for, say, the first 10% of the count, and, thereafter, to generate a fictitious tally favoring one particular candidate. I proposed that scenario to the owner and chief programmer of an election systems company that ran the voting in 1/3 of Ohio's counties and his face grew pale and he started to stutter. That's not "proof", of course, but it does cause one to wonder.

Me:Wough...I'll fwd this to some friends and see if we can propose this to our Election Commission which is parked under the Prime Minister's Office (don't laugh, please).

Evan:If you can find the Carter commission's report on the Venezuelan election system it spells it all out quite simply and clearly. Canada uses an all-paper hand-counted system that's nearly as good, but they accomplish that by having much smaller precincts and many more of them. Venezuela's system allows them to have U.S.-sized precincts, but to achieve the same accuracy and proficiency ad Canada.

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