Slashdot Mirror
E-voting to be a 'Train Wreck'?
An anonymous reader writes "The Seattle PI has published an AP story about the problems with E-Voting.
Her conclusion is that there will be so many problems with the more than 100,000 paperless voting terminals to be used in the November presidential election that the fiasco will dwarf Florida's hanging chad debacle of 2000."
Apologies for flying off-topic here, but what does it matter if we have paper ballots or electronic ballots if we aren't going to have elections in the first place?
The "precedent" is already set for suspension of elections. The bombing in Madrid, days before the pro-Iraq-war Anzar government got a swift kick out of office, shows how "Terror Sways Elections."
Nevermind that 90% of the Spanish people opposed Spain's entry into the Iraq war, or that the Nationalists suppressed evidence and blamed the bombing on ETA.
But that "liberal" New York Times bravely parroted the party line that Terror Sways Elections, so when ours are suspended, Cheney can say "Look, it's not just me, it's in the New York Times!"
Regardless of how you feel about the "Black Tuesday" scenario outlined above, the important point is this:
If you're going with the opinion that Terror Sways Elections, you're basically stating that terror is an effective political tool. Is that the precedent you want to set?
The US independence on July 4, 1776. That was 228 years ago. Plus, at that time, there were simply fewer people. While I don't know what difficulties the US might have had with vote counting back then, the fact is that we've had over 200 years to get the paper-and-pencil method right.
Why? Humans are slow, and they don't think ahead. It takes a long time for people to figure out what's wrong with their methods, and they're slow to adopt changes to correct their problems.
Taking this into consideration, why should we be surprised that electronic voting doesn't work yet? OF COURSE they're going to screw it up! Even Diebold and their unethical behavior is par for the course.
You know how a lot of different kinds of software don't become "feature complete" until they've been around for about 10 years? I once read that in an article linked by slashdot (so it must be true *g*). Voting software isn't going to be any exception.
But feature completeness is only one part of the problem, especially when you have a system that (nearly) EVERYONE wants to hack. Computer security has been a problem for a very long time, and it doesn't look like it's going to get solved any time soon. We probably need another 50 years before things get figured out. Buffer overflows are only the focus of THIS decade -- once that's dealt with, who knows what's next.
So don't sweat it. The simple fact is that we'll be lucky if our grand children (if we're in our 20's) see reasonably good electronic voting machines. That's just the result of the way technology moves when humans are involved.
This should scare everyone, no matter what their political affiliation.
There's going to be voter fraud BIG TIME this election, and paperless voting will only help that happening.
I seriously think we're going to end up with precincts that people not eligible to vote voting anyway, people voting multiple times, people buying votes, polls being left open HOURS longer than they were supposed to (judge in the pocket, get him to rule for you... Hey! Throw an election your way!)
OK, that's not much of a stretch. Those things happened in Florida, Missouri and Wisconsin last national election.
How many convictions did you hear about because those things? None.
This is gonna get a lot worse before it gets better, and there had better be some serious jail time for the people who are doing this stuff or it'll be impossible to hold an election.
I seriously think we're going to hear about precincts that end up with more votes than actual registered voters.
How would you feel if you spent hundreds of dollars on a robot that buttered your toast, only to find that it took more time to fill up the butter reservoir and clean the machine than it did to butter your toast in the first place?
Product development and marketing is designed to make potential customers not think about this. For example, those self-contained iced tea making machines are actually no faster than simply boiling the water in a microwave, brewing the tea, and dumping it over ice, but that doesn't stop millions of people from spending $20 on the machine. Effectively, electronic voting is riding on the tremendous marketing behind technology over the last two decades, and it appears tons of people got hooked and are now being reeled in.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak