NYT Notes Flaws In Current Electronic Voting Methods

dstates writes "The New York time has an informative article on electronic voting with some frightening statistics and interesting anecdotes. Printers on Diebold machines in Cayahoga County OH jammed 20% of the time, making paper trail recounts suspect. Crashing voting machines in California reportedly resulted from Windows CE sensing fingers sliding from one key to another as a drag and drop event, and the Diebold software failing to handle the event. Of course, rather than just ignore this unanticipated condition, the OS did the right thing for a voting machine and crashed."

Comments

Software standards are just terrible, complicated

[compumike]

I am totally shocked that even Diebold could screw up this badly, making systems that crash under normal usage conditions. But the design philosophy they took is the wrong one. Look at the complexity behind these things! Keep it simple and they might have done much better. Why base something like this off of Windows CE? How many megahertz do I need to do a voting machine? Seriously, all of this extra hardware and software means more abstraction (which is considered a good thing in the computer science world), but it also means more abstractions that can be misinterpreted and misused. For a system whose job is so simple, keep the product equally simple.

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Coder? Want to learn electronics? Microcontroller kits.

i am no luddite

[circletimessquare]

i am also no technofetishist

sometimes, more tech thrown at a problem makes it worse, not better

there is no compelling argument, NO COMPELLING ARGUMENT to use anything more than

1. pencil
2. paper
3. optical scanner

there is however, with electronic voting, AND mechanical voting something else:

1. increased number of attack vectors
2. loss of transparency in the voting process, and therefore mistrust in democratic results, and lingering lack of faith in government

the only arguments for electornic voting are:

1. kickbacks to officials
2. increased business for a business that shouldn't exist

no electronic voting. ever. anywhere

accepting it means that people will begin to erode their fatih in democracy

if they can't see it, smell it touch it, they won't trust it

once again:

1. pencil
2. paper
3. optical scanner

anything else represents an eroding faith in democracy

Election standards are below standard

[Bananatree3]

Imagine Diebold going to NASA/Air Force and trying to peddle their sub-standard hardware for mission-critical situations. I'm sure they would be given the boot faster than they can cry in pain. Why should our nation's most critiqued software/hardware (Think: Space shuttle computer, NORAD tracking software) work 99.99999% of the time, but our Elections hardware/software is bought only on the good faith of some business executive?