Slashdot Mirror
Cringley on E-voting
alfredo writes "I am shocked that this story from I Cringley hasn't been sent in and posted at Slashdot. I thought the slashdot crowd would be all over this. Robert X Cringley has a take on the voting scandal a bit different than what we have seen in the past, and promises more to come."
I can't imagine too many business owners liking those odds, but the picture does get darker. If 28 percent of software projects were complete successes in 2000, then 72 percent were at least partial failures. And in software, even partial failure generally means getting absolutely nothing for your money.
What does this mean? If you want a program that does X, Y and Z, and you get one that does X and Y, it could still be useful and worth the money you spend.
I think that when you look at lots of 'business' apps, all it has to do is get it close to right, it doesn't need to work 'perfectly' every time as long as it doesn't corrupt the data, and a lot of the QA work is simply mess with it until it gets stable, rather then having any kind of real proof that it works correctly.
That said, I think a lot of slashdot users, or at least me, noticed a lot of "hackwork" style coding with the Diebold voting system. Especially the use of Microsoft tools and MS access.
Its like they slathered together a bunch of components they already had, did a little debugging, and tried selling the the things.
What's frustrating about it is we all know that it's possible to do this simply, and well, but Diebold chose to do a crappy job and lie about it, rather then doing it right the first time.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
If EVERY OTHER kind of machine you make includes an auditable paper trail, wouldn't it seem logical to include such a capability in the voting machines, too?
The reason why the voting machine doesn't produce an audit trail is that it's rather difficult to produce such an audit trail AND assure that votes cast will be anonymous. Elsewhere in the world people who voted for the "wrong" candidate faced retaliation, and the US voting system was set up to try and prevent that. Some systems that will "chop up" receipts have been proposed, but a failure in the mechanism might cause it to lose anonymity. I've proposed a method of having both audit and anonymity, but it's a bit on the complex side.