I like the Iraqi's method of voting. Stick your finger in a can of paint and mark the ballot. No chance of voting twice either, that stuff doesn't come off for days.
I don't dispute that a lot of the problems with electronic voting in the US are incompetence-related. The problem is that you are, for some bizarre reason, simply taking on faith that no-one has abused that incompetence to skew an election, when it has been amply demonstrated that doing so would be a trivial exercise.
So if I rigged a machine to add a million votes to my candidate, my individual impact would be small?Originally Posted by jmervyn
I think not!
Apples & oranges. If I manage to snooker the IRS out of a million dollar tax return, is my individual impact small? I'm talking about individual impact of proper conduct, and how the governmental machine views the importance of this impact. In other words, gub'mint wants your munee more than your vote.
You'll excuse me for believing the opposite should be the norm...
So far as I am aware, Diebold-type closed source computer voting is still not the norm. So I don't know that computerized voting is widespread enough to have impact at this point.
Of particular disgust to me is that Diebold and perhaps some others "pulled a Micro$oft", in that they claimed to open their source in the so-called "Shared Source" fashion. They did so in order to detract from the truth regarding the use of FOSS code on voting machines. In reality, "Shared Source" is nothing more than a con game; what are all but the hardiest of geeks going to do with hardcopies of proprietary code that they can't test, debug, or particularly verify are complete & accurate?
But as to your main issue, I'm not at all discounting the idea that fraud would be out of the question. I'm only saying that hand-wringers have generally claimed this ludicrous situation is something deliberately seeded in order to facilitate fraud. I think that detracts badly from the central issue, because the claim then becomes a political football and one side digs in, rather than just solving the problem.
Yup. A million dollar tax return is nothing compared to electing a president falsely.
One will be audited & caught, the other will wind up in a Supreme Court and discounted. Like, you're in jail for one, but nothing happens in the other.
Even more fun...
And just when I thought comparisons to M$FT couldn't be worse, we hear, "That's not a bug, that's a feature!
"Diebold's machines are based on custom hardware that runs Microsoft Corp.'s Windows CE operating system." Color me so surprised...
Screw the :deadhorse: , where's that :vomit: smilie?
Diebold in particular have an open and known pro-Republican bias. I'm sure you've had their Chief Executive's commitment to "helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president" quoted at you often enoughTheir habit of employing convicted fraudsters doesn't exactly help - in 2002 they bought a company called GES. This wouldn't be a big deal, except that the majority stockholder was a guy called Jeff Dean, who wrote GES's election software, and who had spent time in jail for illegally building 'back doors' into ATM software he had worked on in the past.
Basically, I'm saying that, yes, Diebold produce sloppy products that are full of security holes. But they also have a habit of employing people who are well aware of the illegal gains those security holes can provide.
<edit>
As to Diebold-type software being the norm...
<edit>
On the closed-source issue... Yes, it's a big issue. However, I would consider 'paper-free' voting to be at least as dangerous as closed-source, probably more so. After all, even if the balloting software feeds back the wrong result, a paper trail will at least allow for a manual recount. If an individual voter cannot verify by sight that their vote has been accurately, unalterably and permanently logged, electronic voting simply should not be permitted by any body responsible for the integrity of that election.
Why, yes, you've managed to epitomize my complaint about the tin-hatted nature of this issue perfectly. :sad2: Trying to claim that this is somehow a GOP issue is not just farcical, but it discounts the bipartisan nature of the dunderheads choosing the product (at our expense).Diebold in particular have an open and known pro-Republican bias. I'm sure you've had their Chief Executive's commitment to "helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president" quoted at you often enough
Fine. Certainly no argument. But are we to believe that there's no other game in town? Cobblers.
That's why I didn't just say FOSS was the ticket. <IF> (and that's a big IF) you have a voter reciept matched with internal records, you can verify that 'poisoning' of the machines doesn't occur. You won't be able to poison a clean install in such a way that it isn't noticeable.
The point of using FOSS is to ensure that there's no backdoors or ability to poison the pool in the original code, whereas the point of paper trail is for verification. You could even master CD's of the voting software and distribute them to all concerned. The best alternative (a dual paper trail) came up during the argument over the lack of a paper trail, when it turned out that the <ability> was there and that the vendor had simply disabled it.
Hard to take seriously a person who purposely misspells words to make a point.
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