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CS Students Called In To Monitor E-Voting
An anonymous reader writes, "Electronic voting machines used in Tuesday's elections apparently caused only isolated problems, although watchdog groups say it's too early to give an overall grade to their performance. One county in California, hoping to avoid any technological glitches, hired computer-science graduate students to set up and troubleshoot the machines. The behind-the-scenes look revealed some warning signs of e-voting." From the article: "The county election official expected many elderly poll workers to be confused by the technology, so she recruited... 59 computer-science graduate students from [UC] Davis to help poll workers troubleshoot the machines on Election Day."
Grad students are cheap but the most effective choice would have been IT operations people, with the experience to yell immediately if someone with a clipboard and a vendor nametag shows up to install a patch.
CS grad students would be a great choice for auditing the design and the source code. But that's not what happens on Election Day.
Credit for good intentions, though.