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E-Voting: a Flawed Solution in Search of a Problem
blorg writes "In the promised follow-up to last-week's I, Cringely column on E-Voting (discussed on Slashdot here), Robert X. Cringely discusses his proposed solution to the electronic voting mess. The ideas in this piece have all appeared already on Slashdot, but this stands as a well-argued condensation of them into a single article.
In the article, he looks briefly at possible solutions for the auditability problem but ultimately argues that technology introduces more problems into elections than it solves. Instead, he suggests that elections can be run quicker, cheaper and fairer using the paper-based Canadian model."
Cringly has one small flaw in that, the scruitineers from each party do not count the ballots. The officials from Elections Canada do all the counting. The scruitineers are allowed only to observe the process, to ensure that there are no irregularities. In the three elections I scruitineered for, I did not witness any irregularities. And, in all three, no members of the public remained to watch the ballot counting. Voter apathy is probably as high or higher in Canada than in the US.
Julie Moult is an idiot.
Actually, here in Sna Antonio, TX, they now use the Devil-spawned touchscreens with no paper audit trail.
You enter your votes; the machine says "thanks." And off you go.
You can hope it stored your votes correctly.
You can hope it will copy the votes into the data transmission devive they use to collect those votes.
You can hope the central system that reads that device correctly collects and reports all the votes.
But you cannot *know*.
And not a blind, ignorant, tottering ex-NYC Floridian in sight to blame it on.
Hell, I would LOVE paper ballots over this system!
READ the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the other amendments! http://lcweb2.loc.gov/const/const.html
Wrong.
Jean Chretien retired, and the Liberal Party of Canada *elected* a successor.
Canadians voted for our present ruling Party fair and square it was pretty clear who the people of Canada chose.
This is the way politics work in Canada: we vote for people in our riding to represent us, who represent a political Party, the members of the Party elect their leader. In this case the leader of the Party with the most seats in the House was Jean Chretien, he then retired, and the party elected a new leader. When the Parties term is up, or whenever the Party chooses chose prior to the term, the Party calls an election, and the voters of Canada elect new people who represent a Party.
If you don't like what you see then *join a party and vote for your leader*.
Sounds pretty far from a Monarchy to me.
Now - back to the article - I think that the Canadian voting system is pretty good. But what Cringely fails to note is that in Canada, for our elections, we are *typically* only voting for one thing: who will represent us in our riding. Whereas in the US voters are voting for people to represent them, and NUMEROUS referendum items. Canadian votes can be tallied quickly because we have so little to add up. Even using the Canadian system US votes would still take a MUCH longer time to tally.
Please don't confuse the Canadian system with American system. We don't hold "Presidential" elections per se; the point of an election in Canada is to elect Members of Parliament. The Prime Minister is the leader of the party that wins the most seats, and is appointed by the party. The PM is never directly elected by the general electorate.
Thus, in the last election, Jean Chretien was not elected as PM (although he was elected in his riding to the House of Commons); he was the leader of the party that was elected to the most seats. Now, Paul Martin is the leader of the Liberal party, so he is Prime Minister. I see nothing spooky about this whatsoever.