Dave Barry on Electronic Voting

eggoeater writes "With the general interest Slashdot has with electronic voting machines, I thought we'd all enjoy reviewing Dave Barry's take on touch-screen voting machines and debating the merits of police officers carrying lightsabers."

Comments

Re:Maybe a little offtopic but...

[PeterBrett]

He's being facetious... he's being OTT and silly to emphasise his point? Jeez, haven't you heard of dark humour before?

Eletronic voting booth

[gustgr]

Brazil has been using eletronic voting devices for about 6 years. Next month we will have elections sessions for municipal mayors, and we are going to use the eletronic voting system. This system is very reliable.

This Java applet simulates the Brazilian eletronic voting system we use (it is in portuguese).

Re:Eletronic voting booth

[gustgr]

Actually we have already used this system in two Presidential elections, in two Governor elections and in one Municipal Mayor election.

Brazilian government has applyied successfully a campaign to teach the people (a lot of poors and uneducated) how to use this system.

Re:Eletronic voting booth

[Mark_in_Brazil]

This system is very reliable.

Unfortunately, there's very good reason to believe it isn't secure or reliable, at least in the sense of actually recording the will of the voters.
Here's a link to a site where one can download a book (in Portuguese) entitled Burla Eletrônica ("Electronic Scam"). The book contains am objective and yet scathing analysis of the (lack of) security and reliability in the machines used in every Brazilian election since 2000. It's really scary. The government has ignored calls to make the machines more secure. It is left as an exercise for the reader to guess why...
I have said before that I believe Brazil's democracy is much healthier than that of the USA, and I believe this is due to the true multi-party nature of the political system here (as compared to the effectively two-party system in the USA). But the dependence on these "electronic ballot boxes" ("urnas eletrônicas"), with no serious scrutiny being given to them, and with the government trying to sweep signs of trouble under the rug, makes me worry for Brazil's young and vibrant democracy (I say "young" because the first free elections after the military coup of 1964 were held just under 20 years ago).
A point that should hit home for /.ers is that these machines, like their Diebold counterparts, do not leave a paper trail, and make recounts impossible. The subtitle of Burla Eletrônica on the download page is "A máquina que faz seu voto sumir" ("The machine that makes your vote disappear"). It's not clear to me if the big question mark is to punctuate that subtitle or to stress the questionability of these machines.

--Mark

Back door in Diebold machines

[qengho]

We've seen what can happen with the diebold machines

Yeah, but have you seen this? Don't even need a Gameboy to hack the election...

Swift Boat Ads Discredited

[Izaak]

But they haven't been completely discredited.
And since you didn't offer any proof of your assertion, I won't either. nyah nyah.

Several of the original swift boat vets for thruth members have recanted their stories. Other vets have come forward saying they were interviewed by the organization, but their testimony was not used becuase it confirmed John Kerry's story (which matches official Navy records). There is even video footage of one of the swift boat vets for truth completely contradicting his current story; eight years ago he praised Kerry and described Kerry's heroism under enemy fire. Rather than reproduce all the sources here, I will refer you to the great work done at FactCheck.org. They have a well researched and footnoted analysis of the swiftboat claims:

Fact Check looks into Swift Vets.

There has also been huge amounts of evidence that the sift boat vets for thruth have direct ties to the Bush campaign (a violation of campaign finance law if true). The web off connections has been document in the New Your Times as well as various web sites.

Cheers,

Thad