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Diebold Issues Cease and Desist to Indymedia
h0mee writes "Diebold, manufacturer of election equipment, has issued a Cease and desist notice to the upstream provider of San Francisco Indymedia for having links to mirrors of a leaked internal diebold memo. More than just a case of a leak, Diebold has been raising a lot of questions about the fairness and security of elections in the United States. (Perhaps it's time for peer reviewable software like gnu.free? ;)"
E-voting is simply a bad idea. Voting needs to be done using paper, in order to keep accountability. Paper, once written, cannot be changed and can always be recounted. Software offers no such guarantee, not even if a thousand 'experts' all proclaim the software to be safe.
Which means open-source of some sort. Anything else can be rigged, including the paper trail it produces. No part of the election process should be hidden from the electorate, whether comuterised or mechanical. Is that zealotry? It sounds like Common Sense to me.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Hear, hear.
The important thing in democracy is not the voting, it's the counting.
Any technology introduced to improve the act of voting cannot make the act of counting less transparent or democracy suffers.
It is apparent that Diebold's systems (not to mention Diebold's paranoia for secrecy) render the act of counting less accountable and less transparent. Ergo, democracy suffers.
If used in a close election - where exit polling and other secondary measurements are unable to confirm the results of the counting - the wrong person might actually get elected President of the United States of America.
With no sense of responsibility to the coutry at large, this illegitimate President might launch a series of Napoleonic wars to to compensate for his own feelings of inadequacy.
I digress into fantasy... the little blue ones I washed down with all those adult beverages must be kicking in.
Please see Ken Thompson's totally moby hack of Unix, providing a back door even if a system was built from audited code.
m l
http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/back-door.ht
A "Paper Trail" is worthless with computer based voting machines unless the entire system is completely transparent to outside observers.
When it comes to elections no one, no one company and no one thing can be trusted without massive public oversight.
And most specifically the governement itself is the entity least trustable to "certify" that an election process is fair and properly conducted. I'm an American but I've lived through "democratic" elections in a third world country.
If the the press cannot hire its own experts to completely examine the system and freely publish its results there is no democracy.
KFG
KFG
KFG
The fundamental problem is that it needs to be impossible for me to prove to a vote buyer that I voted one way or another.
If I can prove to myself my vote was counted a certain way, so too can it be proved to others. And then votes get bought.
This is a _hard_ problem, and alot of it comes from misunderstanding the nature of it.
--Dan