Around 600 voting machines from Allen County will begin a journey to West Africa on Monday, where they will be used to assist the Benin republic in implementing a new voting system.

The MicroVote voting machines have been in storage at the County Election Board barn since 2006. They fail to meet Americans with Disabilities Act guidelines because they do not have audio capabilities for use by sight-impaired voters. County Elections Director Beth Dlug said it would have cost around $6,000 to have the machines recycled and that efforts to sell them were unsuccessful. So the Election Board decided to donate the machines to the Center of Integrity, Empowerment and Fairness based in Muncie, Indiana, which will collect and store the machines before sending them on to West Africa. The county will pay the $450 cost to ship the machines.

Comments

Add New Search

Bev Harris - Director, BlackBo  - USA now exporting non-democratic elections abroad   |70.193.25.xxx |2009-10-26 08:43:54 Encouraging other countries to take our undemocratic, private, concealed counting machines undermines democratic concepts abroad. Our poor leadership in the area of truly public elections is the downside to this action; the upside is that some good legal precedents are being set by foreign countries as they begin to understand that computerized voting machines conceal the counting of the votes from the public, placing this crucial function into the hands of insiders. Of course, no insider in West Africa could possibly be corrupt... Germany gets it. In March, 2009 the high court for the nation of Germany declared the use of its electronic voting system to be unconstitutional because it conceals crucial functions of public elections from the public. The issue is not security, or whether the machines are easy or fast or fun. The issue is that they conceal the counting of the votes from the public, transferring power to a Reply 0   0

Write comment
Name:
Email:	do not notifynotify
Title:
	Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

Powered by !JoomlaComment 3.26

3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."