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Maryland Town Tests New Cryptographic Voting System
ceswiedler writes "In Tuesday's election voters in Takoma Park, MD used a new cryptographic voting system designed by David Chaum with researchers from several universities including MIT and the University of Maryland. Voters use a special ink to mark their ballots, which reveals three-digit codes which they can later check against a website to verify their vote was tallied. Additionally, anyone can download election data from a Subversion repository and verify the overall accuracy of the results without seeing the actual choices of any individual voter."
I don't honestly believe that if my choice McCain had won, anything would be any better. So what's it matter whether my vote was counted or not.
This is a major problem, but it is a separate issue. We can't have a healthy democracy without solving both of them. You can't tell me which needs to be solved first.
Healthy REPUBLIC! No wonder it's unhealthy, no one knows what they actually want...
Maryland's pretty up there. We can rule out everything in the Midwest of course. The west coast is out on philosophical grounds (California being the most tolerable). The mountain states and the states in between are inhospitable, horrible places to live unless you must have your skiing or your 100 degree April mornings. Texas of course is a joke, with its shotgun-toting cowboys, rampant immigration problems, and embarrassing civil rights awareness. Which leaves the East Coast. Let's break it down.
The South doesn't even earn consideration. Any Confederate state is out of the running faster than Montana. The whole American South is a cesspool of religion, anti-intellectualism, racism, and good manners. And slow talking, and long-humid-summer-induced blank stares. And getting arrested for performing oral sex, and lagging behind the rest of the country since Reconstruction. Basically, if you've ever seen Cool Hand Luke (in Alabama chain gang labor was used as late as 1995!) it's impossible to live south of Virginia.
Maryland and New England are then the top spots in the nation. Maybe some other states (Illinois? California?) can be up there, but they're the exception to their regional rules. I'd put New York up high, and Massachusetts. If you can afford to live in the wealthy areas of New Jersey or Boston or whatever, those are the best spots on the east coast. As for Maryland, it's the most temperate of those states without being pest-infested (Kudzu!) like the south. Just cold enough to kill everything but mammals for a quarter of the year, but still relatively cool in the summer.
Oh and Hawaii is out because the culture is less American than many other countries.