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The Waking
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I cannot go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree, but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
--Theodore Roethke
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Joy's Updates - Straight from the Horse's Mouth.
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Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Voting
This is an article about our new electronic voting machines, Hart eSlates. It makes me feel even better about then than I did after we were trained. It's a long article, but you can scroll down to the eSlate section. Here are excerpts from the article in The Austin Chronicle by Lee Nichols:
Unlike Hart's major competitors, the eSlate does not use a touch screen. "I had trouble with calibration issues on the touch screens," Travis Co. Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir says, meaning that the onscreen "buttons" that the voter presses sometimes slip out of alignment with the proper sensors underneath the screen. "Not all of them, but some of them. It's what happened in Dallas [during early voting in the 2002 general election, on ES&S machines]; you end up maybe casting a ballot for the other candidate and don't realize it. They've done some things in the industry to try to improve it since I first looked at it, so in fairness to them, I think they have improved their product, but at the time I was doing the review I found it troubling."
Instead, eSlate uses a wheel-and-button system – the voter turns a dial until the candidate of choice is highlighted, and then presses a button to select the candidate, never touching the screen. (As in all DRE systems, the voter can correct errors before finally pressing the "cast ballot" button.)
Secondly, eSlate does not use "smart cards," credit-card-sized devices given by the election workers to voters, who plug them into a voter terminal, letting the machine know that the person standing before it is indeed a legitimate voter. The Rice/Johns Hopkins researchers say that it would be terribly easy to "homebrew" such cards, which an attacker could then sneak into the polling place and use to cast multiple votes. The eSlate voters, in contrast, are assigned unique personal identification numbers when they show up at the polling place, which they then enter into the voting machine. The number's validity expires either upon casting the ballot, or, if unused, within a few minutes of its assignment.
Perhaps most important, the eSlate system has no external connections – no hookups to phone lines, the Internet, or an intranet. While some systems allow results to be sent by modem to a central vote-counting facility, the eSlate is comparatively old-fashioned – much like an old-style ballot box, the devices ("mediums") into which votes are recorded are removed by the election judges after the polls close and physically transported to the central counting station. Asked if she would ever try to transmit election results over the Internet or modem, DeBeauvoir said, "No way. ... Never."
In fact, trying to find specific criticisms of eSlate or Hart is difficult. Searches of Internet and Nexis databases turn up only minor reports of human error and no major security failures by eSlate. And in her book Black Box Voting: Ballot-Tampering in the 21st Century, Bev Harris – the nation's most visible nonscientist critic of e-voting – limited her criticism of Hart to the company's Republican-leaning investors.
DeBeauvoir is not as concerned about computer error – she notes that the eSlate has triple-redundancy storage mediums than can be cross-checked, real-time audit logs, and can recall an image of each ballot that has been cast (although it cannot match the ballot with the person who cast it). My problem with any of them is that I'd like a paper receipt that assures me that I voted for the candidates I intended to. I hope they'll add that since we get receipts from transactions we make.
11:28:00 PM
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