Slashdot Mirror
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."
This dude is on the CANADIAN payroll. No wonder he thinks the "superior" "canadian paper model" is better.
This is yet another Canadian plot to intimidate, impersonate, and infiltrate our precious bodily fluids!
I don't know anything about Canadian politicians. How would a mere Floridian know who to vote for?
I drank what? -- Socrates
Being a Canadian and a having experience with the Federal voting system, it doesn't offer a bad user experience either. You file with Elections Canada when you submit your tax return, and when election time comes around you get your lovely elector card.
On election day you're in and out in 10 minutes, with one neat x, and merrily on your way!
-s
Cringley is 100% correct. Look at the cost/speed. All this voting machine crap is just patronage & graft unbridled. Read the Cringley column.
The Canuck system is 100% open, 100% low-tech.
I'm screaming like some kind of Cliff Stoll now, but this shit is getting ridiculous.
Canadian cost per capita: $1.81
US cost $3.27
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.
Some of us hosers have had a couple of elections recently: the Ontario provincial election and the city council/mayoral election.
I was most impressed by the mayoral elections. In Toronto (don't know about the rest of them), the voting was electronically tallied but had a built-in audit trail.
The ballot was pretty simple: you connected two parts of an arrow together that pointed at your choice of candidate. None of this Florida confusion, you literally pointed at who you were voting for! Then, the ballot was read by a scanner that was placed over a large box. The scanner confirmed that your vote had been counted correctly, and the box kept the ballot.
At the end of the day, the election TV coverage was almost farcical because almost all the results were in within an hour. If any candidate wanted to contest the vote, all the original ballots had been retained as part of the system.
Maybe that would be a good system for the U.S.
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.
When you have the vast majority of computer nerds/geeks arguing against making a system computerized then you should probably listen to them. When a group that is almost categorically in favor of a certain idea is convinced to argue against that idea, you know that you've stumbled upon a special circumstance that deserves some further consideration.
The big fuss is that the e-voting systems are being pushed because the last US presidential election fell within the margin of error of the voting system. This created an atmosphere of crisis. So rather than having an evolution of voting machines, we are getting a substandard product of crisis politics. Even worse, the crisis is being used as a justification for a great deal of pork barrel politics.
The evoting systems are coming from a flawed decision making process.
The development of closed source voting systems is also very anti-democratic. Ideally, voting sytems would have each logical step in the process open for criticism and review. Electronic voting is part of the democratic process. So this is a very good place for people favoring OSS to show case their ideals.
I'm surprised Slashdot readers don't support tech voting solutions.
You're seeing the scism between fresh-faced young college kids with enthusiasm for all things technological and us old hands who have almost every project we have ever had the misfortune to work on fail in one way or another. The fresh faced college kids are all ra-ra for technology ("Technology for all! Arn't computers great? We'll change the world!") while us old hands are simply looking at yet another project that is surely going to fail in oh-so-many predictable ways.
Trust the old hands. Technology is all shit, and none of it works.