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States Throw Out Electronic Voting Machines
Davide Marney passes along an AP story about the thousands of voting machines gathering dust in warehouses across the country after states such as California, Ohio, and Florida have banned their use. Many of these machines cost $3.5K to $5K each. Local election boards are struggling to find ways to recover any of the cost of the machines, or even to recycle them. The picture in Ohio is the most confusing, as multiple court cases limit the state's options and result in a situation in which the discredited machines will nevertheless be used in the presidential election coming up in November. The state's new (Democratic) attorney general has just issued a rule banning the practice of election workers taking the machines home with them the night before elections.
Of course not. With Linux it would not need antivirus software.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Actually, it's not Ohio Governor Ted Strickland you need to really thank for this, it's Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner who came in with Strickland (who had previously specialized in election law).
By comparison, her predecessor Ken Blackwell was one of those involved in guaranteeing the electoral votes of Ohio would go to Bush. Which of course had nothing at all to do with the fact that white suburban precincts had plenty of voting machines and about a 10 minute wait while poor black urban precincts had 5 hour waits and college campuses closer to 6 hour waits.
I am officially gone from
Wide use of these machines was adopted in the 2000 election: Winner=George Bush
Even more are used in the 2004 election: Winner=George Bush
Now they throw them out just in time for the 2008 election because George Bush might win again if they didn't.
No, wide use of these machines was implemented after the 2000 election.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
If there is a 5 hour queue at the time when the voting shall end - will these be disqualified from voting?
No. If you're in line when the polls officially close, you must still be allowed to cast your vote.
A trebuchet is a form of catapult.
Nobody expects the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.
Incidentally, the mechanical lever systems bear the same major problem as electronic voting systems: they can be undetectably modified.
Except that you can detect their modification by testing them.
Electronic voting machines could have their modification triggered in dozens of undetectable ways. They do run the clock forward, and do a bunch of votes on it, so it's not going to switch on a specific time, but it could easily be triggered by specific ballot, or pushing the screen in a weird spot, or anything. And then, at the end, copy the correct software into place and wipe itself.
I'm not a huge fan of mechanical voting machines, but they at least either work all the time, or fail to work all the time. If you push a button 1000 times and it counts to 1000 in a test, you can be sure, mechanically, that's correct.
Yes, in theory, there could be some sort of clever linkage built into the machine as a backdoor, same as in an electronic voting machine, but they also do a quick visual inspection of the machinery before the voting.
Whereas there's no way to detect that in a computer:
a) The 'software certification' demonstrably not work. There is too much access to the machine, there are repeated instances of last-minute updates that demonstrate that no one takes it seriously, and poll workers have no idea how to check that.
b) Even if we could prove the software actually running was the right software, that does not exclude very clever backdoors that are actually in the certified code. Although at least we could track them down later...but they could easily be hidden as bugs, and unless there was some evidence they were actually triggered, what do we do?
c) Even if we know the software is perfect, and is actually what is on the machine...these things run Windows and the rest of the machine doesn't have to be certified. All you have to do is combine a 'rootkit' and a game 'trainer' and rewrite memory addresses. (Of course, is ignoring the fact that half such machines run Access, and that's easy enough to modify anyway.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?