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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."
All forms of electronic voting should be banned. We've seen what can happen with the diebold machines, and we all know ow easy it is to manipulate data. Count all votes three times by three different groups of people and all discrepencies accounted for. This is our right, a democraticaly voted government. Fuck the costs.
RTFA. Really, do. It's funny. You'll like it. And if you're not a slashdot regular, probably it will be your first introduction to the fact that electronic voting is an issue that you should be concerned about. Of course, its not very informative, but it will at least lead you to think about hackers as a concern for e-voting. And you'll be participating in a modern American phenomenon -- using comedians as a major source of information about current issues. Yay USA!
Realize that it's because we understand technology that we're against most electronic voting. We network out toasters, and then we share with everyone who wants to know how we did it. Then they can point out things we did that could burn down our house. If Diebold used Linux, a lot more people probably would be for it, because Linux is open source and we'd be able to look at how the voting machines were built and figure out security holes that could be exploited by less honest individuals.
this does a couple of things. one, it confirms your choice. (no more florida issues). and two, it automatically counts the vote. when the polls close, the total is uploaded to the central 'counting' station, and within minutes they have totals. the only timme we get into recounts is when the margin is so close that it triggers one.. in which case they manually count them.
seems to work. paper & technolgy together . just a thought but there's no reason to get all weird about improving the voting system.
one other thing i'd say is that having ONE voting system accross the entire system is not a bad idea. votind districts don't control it, the cheif electoral officer (municipal, provincial, or federal depending on the election) decides what system to use. that way if it's buggered up, it's buggered for everyone.
now if we could only get rid of first past the post we'd be laughing.
... but why not do this nowdays: give me some "cookie" number when I vote and let me see later (via INet most probably) how have you really counted my voice. Can be done like this: I pull my voting blank from a pool of those (like in a lottery), there's an unique number on it that no-one knows but me. I can write it down to my notebook/PDA if I wish and you - when counting the votes - store to some DB that a given cookie number is registered as a vote for this or that candidate. You can also give me some kind of receipt so that if I find my vote has been messed up somehow I have something to proove it.
A Portfolio with custom hardware, specifically a card that listens to and uses EM noise to attack unshielded electronics inside the ATM chassis, probably plugged into the Atari's serial port. Certain ATMs are vulnerable to pin-snarfing this way.
Not to mention, at the time, the Portfolio was one of the most portable machines... should he have lugged around a Compaq CRT/lunchbox computer?