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The State of Electronic Voting In the 2008 US Elections

Posted by Soulskill on from the no-paper-trail-no-problem dept.

Geek Satire writes "Voting works only if you believe your vote gets counted accurately. The 2008 US elections have avoided many well-known problems of the 2004 and 2000 elections, but many problems remain. O'Reilly News interviewed Dr. Barbara Simons, advisor to the Federal Election Assistance Commission, to review electronic voting in the 2008 US elections, discussing the physical security of storing and maintaining election machines, the move from electronic back to paper ballots, and why open source voting machines don't necessarily solve problems of bugs, backdoors, and audits."

5 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Voting is a joke now by SmokeyTheBalrog · · Score: 3, Informative

    I'm damn happy that Obama won.

    But if you look at the Popular vote it was 53% Obama vs 46% McCain. While that is a large gap, it's certainly not large enough to say McCain could never have won.

    http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/president/

  2. Re:Paper??? by Snowblindeye · · Score: 4, Informative

    Oh, and they have over 10x the population we do, electronic voting certainly tallies properly.

    I've heard that argument before, and I don't think it holds. As the grandparent said, paper voting should scale, cause you have more ballot places for a larger population.

    Case in point: Take Germany. They use paper ballots with a circle and an X, just the GP describes. It works fine and you have the results with the same speed as you get them in the US. Faster, if you compare it to 2000. A recount would be much faster, cause they are easy to read.

    If they can do it for 50 million voters, then I don't see why it won't also work for 100 million voters in the US.

  3. Re:Help America Vote? by Xylaan · · Score: 5, Informative
    The two party system occurs mostly due to our first-past-the-post voting system.

    See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_past_the_post#Effect_on_political_parties

  4. Re:Help America Vote? by nedlohs · · Score: 2, Informative

    IRV is used in Australia. Australia has a two-party* system. So clearly that isn't a ailver bullet.

    *OK, one party is a fixed coalition of two parties - but that coalition is defined before the elections, and never changes, so really it's two wings of a party.

  5. Scantegrity by Arathon · · Score: 3, Informative

    I think everyone who is interested in electronic voting should take a look at this website. This group was originally just a bunch of computer scientists trying to apply theory to practice. In my opinion, they succeeded quite well, and I wish more people had heard of them.

    Scantegrity.org