NYT Notes Flaws In Current Electronic Voting Methods 121
dstates writes "The New York time has an informative article on electronic voting with some frightening statistics and interesting anecdotes. Printers on Diebold machines in Cayahoga County OH jammed 20% of the time, making paper trail recounts suspect. Crashing voting machines in California reportedly resulted from Windows CE sensing fingers sliding from one key to another as a drag and drop event, and the Diebold software failing to handle the event. Of course, rather than just ignore this unanticipated condition, the OS did the right thing for a voting machine and crashed."
Software standards are just terrible, complicated (Score:5, Insightful)
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Coder? Want to learn electronics? Microcontroller kits. [nerdkits.com]
A minimalist open approach is needed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Absentee Vote! (Score:3, Insightful)
Doesn't that open up a whole bunch of ways to do fraud?
In the post office, possibly:
"Here are the votes from the very (hated political party) area"
"Put them behind box over there, I will get to them next week"
"But they have to be counted by tomorrow"
"Yeah, so?
i am no luddite (Score:5, Insightful)
sometimes, more tech thrown at a problem makes it worse, not better
there is no compelling argument, NO COMPELLING ARGUMENT to use anything more than
1. pencil
2. paper
3. optical scanner
there is however, with electronic voting, AND mechanical voting something else:
1. increased number of attack vectors
2. loss of transparency in the voting process, and therefore mistrust in democratic results, and lingering lack of faith in government
the only arguments for electornic voting are:
1. kickbacks to officials
2. increased business for a business that shouldn't exist
no electronic voting. ever. anywhere
accepting it means that people will begin to erode their fatih in democracy
if they can't see it, smell it touch it, they won't trust it
once again:
1. pencil
2. paper
3. optical scanner
anything else represents an eroding faith in democracy
Re:Right, it's MS' fault. (Score:3, Insightful)
Election standards are below standard (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Software standards are just terrible, complicat (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you really think that the designers at Diebold are stupid? I don't. I think the unnecessary complexity is purposeful. Much like modern legislation, if you make it a bloated hypercomplex thing, it's much easier to hide and manupulate things in there. Now of course this sounds like conspiracy theory, but there is another very simple thing that occurred to me in the first ten seconds of reading the article. "Why was there only one tally server doing the counting? Why not enter the information into each of two or more separate tally servers? Would that expose even more "errors"? Tallying votes securely should not be a difficult thing. Here on slashdot there have been dozens of well thought out ways to do that. The only reason that makes any sense for Diebold's "blunders" is that they are not actually trying to count the votes securely and accurately. So while some may say: "Don't attribute to malice what can be more more easily explained by stupidity." I'm saying that multi-million dollar high profile contracts like these are not engineered by teams of incompetent fools. This cannot be attributed to stupidity, other than using Diebold or ESS machines in the first place.