Slashdot Mirror
Dutch Voting Machines De-Certified
Peer writes "The Dutch government has officially decided that it will no longer use voting machines (Babel Fish Translation) for elections. So it's pencil and paper from now on. Activists have been campaigning against the use of voting machines for some time."
For instance, one of these but with a human-readable bar code along the left side.
(rot13) rpbzbab@tznvy.pbz
Google Translate gives a better translation than Babelfish:
http://www.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.minbzk.nl%2Factueel%2F112441%2Fnieuw&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=nl&tl=en
It seems a bit ironic that all this fuss is made about the secrecy and accountability of those voting machines, while the parties that we (the Dutch) elect with these machines are so expressedly in favour of recording every bit of information about the citizens.
Next week a law proposal will be accepted that forces telcos and ISPs to keep records of all communications by all of their subscribers, not just those for which some tap warrant has been issued, and store them for 18 months or maybe more.
And of course we already are the number-1 country for taps on telephony and internet traffic.
The next proposal, to require everyone using an internet cafe or buying a mobile phone to present an ID (and presumably all those sessions and phones to be registered with that ID) was brought forward this week.
All this for the sake of easing the finding of criminals. It seems strange that it is not required to register each citizens vote as well, as that could provide as much of a clue as what sites he is visiting.
Please mention the "real" URL: http://www.minbzk.nl/actueel/112441/nieuw and provide the link for the translation behind in parentheses. Even though Dutch is a language spoken by a relatively small number of world citizens, there are some who prefer the Dutch language.
I myself prefer to read English unless Dutch is the original language.