[ale] Is there any way to stop this travesty? -- NO, of course not!

[Jonathan Glass]

These are all really good points for these voting systems to be 
open-source. At least that way someone other than the vendor can see the 
code and determine what it is doing. Just my $0.02.

Jonathan

At 12:49 PM 8/23/2002 -0600, Joseph A. Knapka wrote:
>"SanMillan, Todd" wrote:
> >
> > The deeper problem with electronic voting is the lack of an audit trail.
> > See RISKS LIST http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/21.12.html#subj1.1 for an
> > intro.  These are all closed source systems that are "self-auditing".
> > Meaning that once the election results are reported, there is no 
> possibility
> > of a recount to verify results.  If there are systemic problems, how 
> can you
> > rely on the system to find and report errors?
>
>Gosh, I hope I'm misundertanding what you're saying here.
>
>Why would anyone, even a politician, ever -consider- the use
>of a voting system that didn't permit external
>auditing of election results? Not only can't you rely on the
>system to find and report errors, you can't rely on it not to
>-intentionally introduce- errors in order to push an agenda.
>Any electronic voting system would have to, at minimum, allow
>a voter to verify that their vote was recorded properly (without,
>of course, allowing anyone else to do so), at any time after
>the vote was cast, IMO.
>
>There would still be room for the processing firm to manipulate
>the results, however, since nothing short of a complete manual
>count could verify the electronic results, unless further
>measures were taken to ensure the integrity of the data. I'm
>not sure what those measures would be, though. The very fact
>that no one other than the voter should be permitted to
>find out the mapping between votes and voters places pretty
>strong limits on how much verification can be done. (Of course,
>this sort of game can be played with paper ballots as well,
>but it would be a great deal more effort, and therefore harder
>to conceal.)
>
>-- Joe
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Jim [mailto:jcphil at mindspring.com]
> > Sent: Friday, August 23, 2002 1:25 PM
> > To: Keith R. Watson; Irv Mullins; ale at ale.org
> > Subject: Re: [ale] Is there any way to stop this travesty? -- NO, of course
> > not!
> >
> > On Friday 23 August 2002 01:09 pm, Keith R. Watson wrote:
> > > Irv,
> > >
> > > The quoted article:
> > >
> > >
> > http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/epaper/editions/today/metro_d3569ddbd46e52
> > >e d0013.html
> > >
> > > said the following:
> > >
> > > "Diebold officials say its machines have been used in elections in
> > > Maryland, Virginia, Indiana and California with few reported problems."
> >
> > Going back to my earlier comments on systems for financial services,
> > Diebold,
> > of course has great experience in this area. They were originally a
> > manufacturer of safes, but they also make ATM's for banks. ATM networks are
> > wonders of redundancy and reliability. So, if anybody could pull this 
> off, I
> >
> > would think it would be the people at Diebold.
>
>--
>   "I'd rather chew my leg off than maintain Java code, which
>    sucks, 'cause I have a lot of Java code to maintain and
>    the leg surgery is starting to get expensive." - Me
>
>---
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