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Linux Takes Over E-Voting In Australian State
daria42 writes "The Electoral Commission in the Australian state of Victoria has made plans to expand its use of electronic voting kiosks based on Linux in the next state election in November of this year. But it appears to be a little confused: the documentation states it will be using the '2.6 kernel/Gentoo release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.' Huh?"
I have never seen a computer of any kind in a place where we vote. The process is obsessively manual and works very well.
This is what surprised me. I was involved in the last election giving out the ballots and counting at the end. There were only 3 of us at our booth and we were paid something like $200 for the day. The process went very smoothly and everyone knew what to do. I think introducing computers here will be more expensive and cause more problems than it is worth.
Hah, as a nerd I never thought I would say something like that.
Have you ever tried to track how your paper vote is counted?
Yes I did. I am not sure of the US system but here (France) any citizen is welcome to participate or oversee the public counting of ballots. We use transparent ballot boxes so you are free to stay in the voting office from the opening to the counting. There are always several people there including opponents.
Any voting system is subject to fraud. It's only the way of committing the fraud that changes.
It is also the scale. Electronic voting makes nation-wide fraud possible. Electronic voting gives a single point of failure for fraud : the machine manufacturer.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.