[ale] voting machine redux

[Joe]

"Michael D. Hirsch" <mhirsch at nubridges.com> writes:

> Interesting article on Salon that touches on many of the issues surrounding 
> voting machines discussed here last year, and some we missed.  The author 
> does talk a lot about the lack of audit trail most of us are aware of with 
> computerized voting.  More interesting to me was a Senator that holds a 
> major stake in the voting machine company that tabulates the votes in his 
> own state.  And he won in a landslide.   Hmmm.
> 
> I was amused by this:
> 
>     Harris has discovered, for example, that Diebold, the company that
>     supplied touch-screen voting machines to Georgia during the 2002
>     election, made its system's sensitive software files available on a
>     public Internet site.
> 
> It is said like that's a bad thing!  I say, "Kudos to Diebold".  If I were 
> on the elections commission I would say that is a prerequisite for any 
> voting software.

It's frustrating, but the vast majority of normal folks have such a
strong association between "secrecy" and "security" that it will be
very difficult to change that attitude. Anyone with even a passing
interest in cryptography will associate *transparency* with security,
but it's hard to see how to make the public at large get that connection.

-- Joe Knapka
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