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Florida Electronic Voting Machines Crash
crash24601 writes "For a dose of one of our favorite topics, abcnews.com is carrying the story of a tabulation machine for electronic voting crashing during testing. Naturally, this happened in Florida. They are also carrying the article Is E-Voting Fundamentally Flawed? Though mostly a lightweight rehash of issues brought up before, it is good to see it published from a mainstream source."
...According to Rumsfeld, four fifths of a country voting is ok.
Isn't that enough?
"He said an election could perhaps be held in "three-quarters or four-fifths of the country. But in some places you couldn't because the violence was too great"."
I hate my sig.
The reason paper ballots are still used in most democratic countries is that the technology there has not advanced sufficiently, not because it is the easiest and the safest. The exception that proves the rule is that India recently completed its general elections which resulted in a transfer of power. India used a fully electronic voting system,- no paper ballots for a voting population of over 1 billion people. Not even the United States has dared to attempt this. Not only that, the e-voting system used in India is much more secure than the system being proposed in the USA.
This is a perfect example of a urgently needed technology that an Open Source solution would be great for.
It's too bad that's impossible. Your customers can trust open source software, because they can compile and install the software themselves. Voters can't do that, so the best a company can do is publish some source code and make promises that the exact same program will be the only thing running on the voting machines. Since such promises are difficult to verify (see the Diebold machines that got updated with uncertified software for example), you can never be sure that the voting software you're told is open source really is.
To prevent people's votes from being miscounted or uncounted by an electronic system, the only sufficient solution will be a paper trail and/or a cryptographically verifiable receipt. Even then, to prevent electronic systems from adding false votes will require vigilance at every polling booth. Using open source in addition would be nice, but it's neither a necessary nor sufficient solution.
In Israel, which is as technonogically advanced as can be, general elections are always done on paper: Select your party, put the party's name into an envelope, seal the envelope, put it in the box.
Noone has even considered using electronic voting here for the general elections. It just seems so... wrong.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org