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."
I'm Canadian, and we just finished going through a federal election using this method across all ridings.
And there are how many Canadian voters? A dozen? Two dozen, tops?
(sorry for the Troll - couldn't help myself - bad me)
India just put six hundred million voters through an all-electronic election. Once you understand that the idea is to make it easier for society and not more rewarding for the companies that make the hardware - just how hard can it be?
#!/usr/bin/english
If people agreed with that attitude we wouldn't have the microwave or increasingly fuel efficient vehicles. Try thinking ahead a little, m'kay?
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Apparently the problem stems from voters in Florida and elsewhere who cannot write an "X" legibly in a half-inch square.
Just watch how many people claim the button for the candidate they wanted to vote for was broken.
But electronic voting has one important feature: it makes it easy to tamper with the results. That could well be the only thing to get Shrub "re-elected", and many will view the original Florida results as proof the election was rigged.
I don't look forward to the next few years. I see our brethren to the south starting a rather nasty and violent revolution to get rid of the corporate and government trough-feeders. The poor always outnumber the rich, but in the US they not only dramatically outnumber the rich, most of them have guns. It's going to be a lot messier than the last American Revolution was...
I know many think the idea of another revolution is a crackpot idea, but I really don't see it as avoidable. Too many of the people in power are so thoroughly clueless about how the majority of citizens live, and it's going to end up affecting everyone.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
If you can't tell how doubling Canada's population overnight, or even over a year, would break your political system, you're too naive to understand an explanation in this Slashdot medium. Of course you're just willfully ignoring the greater complexity of the USA's much greater and more diverse population. And using such obnoxious language will hardly help convince me to enlighten you. So we can now both stop wasting our time in this pointless "debate".
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make install -not war
They are not concerned, because they only care about one dollar-one vote.
Right-wing people do not like democracy, because it puts the elite on the same footing as the rabble. Worse, it gives the rabble the power to oust the elite that has been busy protecting those who screw the people.
The road to universal voting in anglo-saxon democracies is a long, rocky road barred by landowners. Where I live (a british colony), for example, until about 35 years ago, only landlords were able to vote for the mayor of the city I live in, a city that has a majority of renters.
Anything to undermine democracy is good; this is why, for the last quarter century, we see an unprecedented assault on the State from the right-wing, their goal being the virtual elimination of State activity beyond the maintenance of law and order, the idea being that the rich be able to make a maximum profit on the back of the poor, all the while paying no taxes at all.
So, anything that can discredit democracy is okay: first, they discredit politicians, by insuring that only incompetents and corrupt sycophant and demagogues get appointed to public office (Ronald Reagan is a prime example of that). The net result is the cynical outlook the people currently have about politicians. And the next step is to attack the very core of Democracy: nothing less than the voting system itself. When the people will see that electronic voting has but replaced the electoral process by a business-driven farce, they will totally lose hope in Democracy, and may, in fact, welcome any upcoming dictatorship.
This was the way followed by the between-the-war fascists in Europe; Mussolini and Hitler banked on a widespread resentment against democratic institutions, and were able to seize power and precipitate mankind into unprecedented horror.
In the USA, if shrub is re-elected, not having to worry about re-election, he sure will push forward his hegemonic agenda and the current patriot act road-kill of civil liberties will look pretty tame compared to the widespread lossage of human-rights that will ensue, and the worse is that people will go along with it, having been brainwashed into thinking it being necessary against virtually non-existent terrorist threats.
I think it's really funny that Democrats count convicted felons as one of their constituencies. I can imagine Senator Cornhole bellowing, "I woulda won if the felons coulda voted for me!"
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!