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Dave Barry on Electronic Voting

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the stuff-to-read dept.

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."

3 of 323 comments (clear)

  1. Banned by tuxter · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Comedy as news source by Travis+Fisher · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

  3. voting probs by Spark00 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    for our municipa elections here in Toronto we fill out a ballot (often with 20 or 30 candidates on it because for a couple hundred bucks any knob can get on the ballot), and what happens is you fill it out, then bring it to the 'box' which is a machine. it reads the pencil marks you've made, and if you've done it wrong it rejects it. It gives you a read out of your choices.

    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.