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Show DAILY A6 Sunday, September 9, 2007 HERALD EMTOEIAL EDITORIAL 2aitvj3Hcral& BOARD & Craig Dennis, President Publisher Randy Wright, Executive Editor GUEST OPINION How to improve a voting machine Timothy J. Ryan hen early jet aircraft crashed, Congress did not mandate that all planes remain propeller-drive- But this is the kind of reactionary thinking behind two bills that would require that all voting machines used in federal elections paper produce a record. These bills the Ballot Integrity Act (S. 1487), and the Voter Confidence and Increased are Accessibility Act (H.R. 811) understandable backlashes to the myriad problems encountered in the implementation of electronic voting. Paperless Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) machines, those voter-verifiab- " with paper records. Mandatory paper verification would be a disappointment for blind voters, who could not confirm that their votes were properly cast in the same way that others' were. Also, the counting of paper ballots, if required by a close election, could prove an unwieldy task and take tens of thousands of hours of work. Further, the printers that produce paper ballots are especially susceptible to mechanical failure; as many as 20 percent fail on Election Day, according to Senate testimony this summer by election expert Michael Shamos. All of these drawbacks and more might be tolerable if a paper trail were the only way to double-chec- k votes, but it is not. It is not even the best way. A system called Prime III, developed by researchers at Auburn University, would employ a separate electronic "witness" in each Voting booth. The witness, which would operate independently of the DRE machine, could more efthe DRE's ficiently double-chectallying of votes while safeguarding privacy and being more accessible to the disabled. Another system, Punchscan, designed by a team at the University of Maryland, offers an exciting array of features: After casting their ballots, voters can go to a computer and use a receipt to view their individual ballots online. An exceptionally clever ballot format allows voters to see the marks they made on their ballots in such a way that they can recognize that the marks are in fact theirs, while still obscuring their specific candidate selections, as is necessary While a to prevent simple paper trail ensures that the voter's choices were accurate at one .instant in time, the Punchscan system goes much further. Voters can confirm not only that their ballots were cast correctly but also that they were faithfully counted , after the election. Unfortunately, the language in the Ballot Integrity Act and the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, the latter of which is likely to move to the floor before the end of the month, would prohibit the use of both Prime Prime III and Punchscan III because it does not produce a paper record and Punchscan because the paper record is not preserved by election officials. Given time and the right market incentives, alternatives such as these can be developed, perfected and implemented. On the other hand, mandating a paper record will commit American democracy to an antiquated alternative for the foreseeable future. where votes are entered into computers and stored only in computer memory banks, have encountered numerous failures and no longer inspire public trust. The response proposed in these Senate and House bills is for all such machines to produce paper receipts that voters can examine to ensure that their votes were correctly cast. The goal a double-checis worthy. of the machine tally Unfortunately, paper records are no panacea for the shortcomings of machines, and mandating paper removes the incentive for researchers to develop better electronic alternatives. For proponents, the rationale for paper verification is simple: Voters have no way of knowing that a machine faithfully records their votes in its memory banks. If a machine were compromised by a hacker, for instance, its screen could be made to confirm the voter's intention to vote for "George Washington" while actually registering a Vote for "Benedict Arnold." As such, machines must be made to produce paper records that voters can examine and election officials can retain. ; After an election, the votes in a machine's memory banks could ; be quickly tabulated, but they could also be compared with a tally of the paper ballots. Any discrepancy between the two could be an indication of tampering. Paper verification looks good on, well, paper, but it is not the some of its proponents cure-al- l believe it to be. More than two centuries of U.S. elections have shown us that paper is at least as susceptible to chicanery as electronic records. Paper ballots can be modified, counterfeited or destroyed with relative ease. It is not at all clear that they constitute a more reliable medium than electronic records. Have we forgotten the days I Timothy J. Ryan is a research when ballot boxes could be discovered floating in nearby rivers assistant with the Election Reform shortly after an election? These are not the only problems Project. BLACK i r-- " v vote-buyin- MEDIA VOICES Nuclear roulette From the Los Angeles Times, Sept. 7, 2007 bombs across the last week. The advanced cruise missiles, each packing 10 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb and each marked with bright red symbols, were mistakenly loaded onto a 2 bomber and flown from North Dakota to Louisiana. Now, nuclear weapons are not supposed to be jetting through American skies in peacetime; the Air Force banned their transport by air in 1968 after several scary crashes. So after Congress raised a bipartisan ruckus and the Pentagon had to admit that it didn't know how such a snafu could have happened, the Air Force relieved a munition squadron commander from duty at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. It's convenient but implausible to blame any individual for such a systemic collapse of command and control. That no one was injured by this lapse makes it no less important call for U.S. nuclear as a wake-upolicy. There are lessons the Bush administration is unlikely to heed but the next administration should. First, if such a slip-u- p can occur in the United States, which boasts the best nuclear command-and-contrsystems in the world, how likely are mishaps in the other eight declared and de facto nuclear states, which now include Pakistan, India and North Korea? Very Six U.S. nuclear g p likely. "Loose nukes" that could be lost, stolen or sold to terrorists are a serious threat that has only become harder to address amid deteriorating relations between the U.S. and Vladimir Putin's Russia, the most likely source for purloined nuclear materiel. Second, the sheer number of nuclear weapons in the world makes it a near statistical certainty that accidents will happen. Nuclear weapons do not become less dangerous merely because the risk of human error is known. Yet the Bush administration has framerejected the work that produced triumphs under Republican presidents during the Cold War, and the nuclear momentum now runs in the wrong direction. Russia has threatened to pull out of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, hinted at scrapping the Intermediate-Rang- e Nuclear Forces Treaty. Third, the continued reliance on nuclear weapons as a cornerstone of U.S. defense offers a false sense of security. Nuclear weapons are useless against terrorists and rogue regimes, so why does the U.S. still need 10,000 of them? The administration's insistence on maintaining such a large stockpile only inspires imitation by Iran and North Korea under the guise of a deterrent against regime change. The enduring threat of nuclear disaster can only be reduced when the U.S. leads a new push for multinational, verifiable reductions in the global nuclear arsenal. arms-contr- ORIGIHM- - HERALD POLL k k 7 EDITOR'S NOTE: Recently, the Daily Herald asked its readers what was their view on youth athletics. Here is the response we received. Sports are for kids who want to work hard Travel teams are fun for the kids who want to work harder than other kids at their chosen sport. City programs often suck because the coaching across the board is so poor. The city fills the void by letting any parent coach. Kids need busy practices and short, organized drills. Most parent coaches are clueless. Who feels special about a sport where everyone, win or lose, gets a trophy that means nothing? Winning is a product of player development. Most kids don't want to work enough to become really good. Let them stay in "shcity ball." I Danny Pawelek, Springville Herald poll Recently we asked the following question at the Daily Herald Web site, www.heraldextra.com: "What is closest to your view on youth athletics?" Cancel youth sports in school and focus on academics 15 zT-- -i Winning is overemphasized; focus more on fun and lifetime fitness 49 '"V Winning should be emphasized; it's like other positive achievements 35 Results are unscientific and numbers not add up to 00 percent due to rounding. NOTE: may Total votes: 1,946 AS Current poll: "Was Larry Craig within his rights if he signalled a desire for sex?" Polling is open at our Web site until Thursday at 11:45 p.m. STAFFDaily Herald CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER A weak, partitioned Iraq Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres. Caesar took political Washington a good months to catch up to the fact something significant was happening in Iraq's Anbar province, Sunni where the former-insurgetribes switched sides and joined the Not surprisfight against ingly, Washington has not yet caught up to the next reality: Iraq is being and, like everything else partitioned in Iraq today, it is happening from the ground up. 1. The Sunni provinces. The essence of our deal with the Anbar tribes and those in Diyala, Salahuddin and elsewhere is this: You end the insurgency and we assist and drive out you in arming and policing yourselves. We'd like you to have an official relationship with the Maliki government, but we're not waiting on Baghdad. 2. The Shiite south. This week the British pulled out of Basra, retired to their air base and essentially left the southern Shiites to their own devices meaning domination by the Shiite militias now fighting each other for control. 3. The Kurdish north. Kurdistan has been independent in all but name for a decade and a half. Baghdad and its immediate surroundings have not yet been defined. Despite some ethnic cleansing, the capital's future is uncertain. It is predominantly Shiite, but with a checkerboard of Sunni neighborhoods. The U.S. troop surge is attempting to stabilize the city with, again, local autonomy and policing. This radically decentralized rule is partition in embryo. It is by no means final. But the outlines are there. The critics at home, echoing the Shiite sectarians in Baghdad, complain that an essential part of this strategy the "20 percent solution" that allows former-insurgeSunnis to organize is just setting and arm themselves Iraq up for a greater civil war. But this assumes that a Shiite government in Baghdad would march its army into the vast Anbar province where there are no Shiites and no oiL For what? It seems far more likely that a d and Anbar would create a balance of power that would encourage handsoff relations with the central government in Bagh- I GET FRUSTOTEP It well-arme- dad. As partition proceeds, the central WTTIA HIM SOMETIMES, HEiN&ELEOEPEV TV government will necessarily be very weak. Its reach may not extend far beyond Baghdad itself, becoming a kind of de facto fourth region with a mixed Sunni-Shiit- e up reconciliation in the provinces will translate into tomorrow's ground-u- p national reconciliation. Possible, but highly doubtful. What is far more certain is what we are getting now: ground-u- p partition. population. Nonetheless, we need some central Joe Biden, Peter Galbraith, Leslie government. The Iraqi state may be a shell but it is a necessary one because Gelb and many other thoughtful scholde jure partition into separate states ars and politicians have long been would invite military intervention by calling for partition. The problem is the neighbors Turkey, Iran, Saudi how to make it happen. Arabia and Syria. partition by some new constitutional A weak, partitioned Iraq is not arrangement ratified on parchment is the best outcome. We had hoped for swell, but how does that get enforced much more. Our original objective any more than the other constitutional was a democratic and unified dreams that were supposed to have come about in Iraq? Iraq. But it has turned out to be a bridge too far. We tried to give What's happening today on the the Iraqis a republic, but their leaders ground is not geographical turned out to be, tragically, too driven colonial style. We do not have by sectarian sentiment, by an absence a Mr. Sykes and a Mr. Picot sitting of national identity and by the habits down to a map of Mesopotamia in a of suspicion and maneuver cultivated World War I carving exercise. The during decades in the underground of lines today are being drawn organiSaddam's totalitarian state. cally by self identified communities All this was exacerbated by and tribes. Which makes the new arU.S. strategic errors (most rangement more likely to last. This is not the best outcome, but it is importantly, eschewing a heavy footprint, not forcibly suppressing the ear- far better than the savage and danger' ous ly looting, and letting Moqtada dictatorship we overthrew. And escape with his life in August 2004) infinitely better than what will follow and by barbarous bombing e if we give up in and withcampaign designed explicitly to kindle draw and allow the partitioning of sectarian strife. Iraq to dissolve into chaos. Whatever the reasons, we now have to look for the second-bes- t outcome. A I Charles Krauthammer's democratic unified Iraq might someaddress is letterscharleskrautham day emerge. Perhaps today's ground- mer.com. Top-dow- n post-Sadda- -- post-invasi- mid-surg- |