Slashdot Mirror
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.
Slashdot should buy at least one - and add a Cowboy Neal option to all the screens.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Get a refund. Alternatively, use them as catapult ammunition and return them manually.
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.
t*9.81 m/s
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I don't like these machines either, and am glad they're gone.
But before you all go out into the street to dance, let me remind everyone that those paper ballots aren't exactly hand counted... those too are counted by... say it with me: ELECTRONIC machines. They have software. They are connected to a network. They have to store their results on media at some point.
It doesn't make one "bit" of difference whether a vote is tallied as a bit, or a missing (or hanging) chad... the integrity of an election, ANY ELECTION, is dependent SOLELY UPON the integrity of the people who carry it out.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
I realize this is a joke but one has to wonder... wouldn't this be a great opportunity for the open source community to figure out how to salvage the hardware on these machines by replacing the software with something Open and less prone to errors?
Collector's Edition
This is totally wrong. Any geek knows that you should use a trebuchet.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Another question is, why does a company who make ATM machines which don't lose a cent in millions of transactions and have a paper trail fail to do the same for voting machines?
Don't forget this wonderful youtube clip:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UvEuqYyDoE
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
I think they should give them to the College students as a pet project they would earn bonus points if they can find out how fraud was carried out, along with proof. Would even be a extra grade if they can find out which state / county used that particular box too.
I can dream damn it!
You believe you can trust in paper just because it is widespread and been in use for a while. But there are inherent problems with paper too - ballot theft, miscounting etc. You can't ignore problems like an overzealous volunteer counting a few hundred more votes for his favorite candidate.
Paper can be misused as well... But at least people generally know how paper works. It's a physical medium. You can count actual objects. You can find actual objects that have been stuffed in a waste-basket, or see actual object being stuffed into the ballot-box. We've had a couple hundred years of trying to accurately count paper ballots and have generally worked out the bugs.
The big problem with electronic ballots is not that any given machine was insecure or poorly designed, it's a fundamental lack of understanding when it comes to electronics and computers. Large chunks of the population still don't know what a hard disk drive is, or how software works, or how easy it can be to tamper with an electronic device like a voting machine. People don't understand why it is ok to bring one of the old paper-ballot machines home before an election, but it isn't ok to bring an electronic one home.
Folks here on Slashdot are generally fairly familiar with technology. Folks here typically at least know what source code is and why you might need to be able to read it in order to certify that a machine is or isn't secure. Many, many people out there have absolutely no idea what source code is.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde