[ale] OT: Electronic Voting in GA

[aaron]

On Friday 18 October 2002 16:23, Danny Cox wrote:
> Just to really make your weekend:  today, I received in the mail a
> pamphlet describing how the new electronic voting machines in GA will
> work!  They're secure!  They're accurate!  They're fast!  They're
> completely un-auditable!
>
> 	Sorry, is my cynicism showing?

Yes. Clearly.  ;-)
And its very justifiable:

The voting machines are touch screens, a technology that has proved 
itself completely undesirable to the public and consistently unreliable 
through a thousand attempts at kiosk and banking machine interfaces.

Not that the faulty touch screens will make much difference. To my 
understanding the POS voting boxes run on wince, so their reliability is 
already close to nil.

I know I'd feel a WHOLE lot better about the things if the completed 
ballots were printed out in hard copy so that voters could actually 
confirm and check the form for errors before dropping it in the ballot 
box for counting (and physical auditing and recounting when necessary).

This discussion reminds me that the inventors of democracy, the ancient 
Greeks, could call for a vote to banish (ostracize) incompetent or power 
hungry leaders for a decade at a time.  The balloting was accomplished by 
dropping marked pottery shards (ostrakon) in a barrel. I could consider 
accepting the new voting machines if doing so brought a return of the 
option to banish all the bad public officials by simply busting up a 
little dinnerware!

peace
(after justice)
aaron
 

---
This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be
sent to listmaster at ale dot org.