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Electronic Voting's Fundamental Flaws
phil reed writes "Given the latest fiasco in Florida's continuing attempts to implement a decent voting system, I thought it would be appropriate to alert Slashdot readers to the work of Dr. Rebecca Mercuri. She's been studying voting systems for many years, and has developed well-considered positions on what makes a good electronic voting system (and what makes a bad one). Her comments on the Florida 2002 election can be found in the current Risks Digest. And, if you think that creating a computer-based voting system is easy, she provides a suggested list of questions that should be answered by any developer." Mercuri's statement in Risks is well worth reading. With all due respect, she is wrong in some respects: it is possible to create a fully-verified electronic system. Start with completely open code and thoroughly examined hardware, create an audited system for installing the code on the hardware, and make it tamper-evident so that you know the same code is still there when the machine reaches the voting booths. Bootable, hologrammed, serial-numbered CD-ROMs with individual private keys would do the trick. Mercuri is thinking in terms of vendors selling proprietary "solutions", where she's absolutely right: there's no way to verify that what people punch in is what is actually recorded.
<Interresting(Insightful)?...The moderators don't know what they're moderating, you think?>
Rough translation as both my Kanji dictionary and excite.co.jp had trouble with JI and AN being used together.
Never seen someone bitch about moderation in Japanese. Wonder why they didn't use English if they understood enough to disagree with the moderators?
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
And that's why they should develop a machine that asks the user for their chosen candidate and engraves it into a wooden ball. The unique grain patterns on the ball prevents it from being replaced by a fraudulent ball. This makes the process foolproof, and will undoubtedly be used in other applications in the future.
Forty-nine other states may get it wrong, but florida has the other 49 states' elderly voting there.
Think about it. It's November. It's cold in New York... Let's go to Florida. So they claim residency and vote while they're on furlough.