Indian Voting Machines Compared with Diebold

Hanuman_Ji writes "The Indian general elections, 2004 is now complete - and the result is an upset. As reported earlier, this election was conducted entirely through Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs). This article gives a nice overview of the machines used in this process and also adds a comparison with the Diebold machines. More information is also available at the equipment manufacturer's website."

Comments

Not a fair comparision

[Anonymous Coward]

Each machine has its own strengths and weaknesses based on various design goals. If you happen to be looking for fair and accurate voting tech, by all mean go with the Indian setups. Diebold's customers have different requirements is all.

Re:Remote voting

[R.Caley]

it doesn't do what a lot of people would want (secure internet voting).

Thank god. What's the point of internet voting? If someone can't be arsed to walk 100 yards to vote, why do we want to know what they think -- they probably don't. We have proxy and postal votes for people who really can't make it to a polling station.

in any case isn't `secure internet' a conradiction in terms?

Re:Remote voting

[R.Caley]

OK for townies. In the country people have to travel further.

OTOH, they presumably do so on a daily basis, so it just becomes `go 100 yards out of their way'.

There is a widely recycled assumption that we need to get more people to vote and/or `become involved in politics'. This seems to be to be amazingly stupid. We need to get more people to think about politics. The voting etc will come as a natural consequence. Getting them to vote without thinking first is just a way to reduce the average information content of an election.

Re:Elegant

[morleron]

The thing that I like best about the Indian system is that it essentially duplicates the old-fashioned paper ballot, without the paperwork. Instead of a box that the voter puts his ballot in there's a little electronic box that adds up the votes as it goes along. The control boxes are physically taken to the central voting registry and manually unlocked to record the vote counts, with interested parties having immediate access to the results and the ability to do a precinct-level recount almost immediately.

Notice what's not there: no network to expose data to possible manipulation between voting machine and central server; no fancy machine lacking tamperproof seals; no fancy database with built-in unpassworded backdoor "for support purposes"; no MS software anywhere in the loop; no manufacturer's president sworn to "delivering the vote" for an incompetent incumbent. It's those last couple of items which will prevent the adoption of the Indian system in this country.

Just my $.02,
Ron