This item appeared on Boing Boing today, but I’m quoting it here even so. First, this is a blog, for crying out loud, and if the instant repetition of everything else that happens in the Blogosphere isn’t blogging, what is? Second, this is awfully darn important; we could very well be moving to a situation in which the free and fair elections on which this whole democracy experiment depends become a bad joke.
The subject is, of course, electronic voting. The mad rush to electronic voting has been full of potholes, introducing systems that are highly vulnerable to compromise, and, perhaps, even outright fraud.
Any electronic voting system, at an absolute minimum, must produce paper records of each and every vote, stored securely after review by the voter. Relying on the electronic records themselves for recounts is utter nonsense. Of course a recount based on the electronic records will match the the first count . . . that’s true by definition. No one is questioning whether not the voting machines can add properly; it’s whether or not they are recording the voter’s actual choices that is open to question.
To anyone with a background in technology, the excuses that are being given are clearly specious, amounting to not much more than, “Trust us, everything’s fine. We have unspecified proprietary solutions to these problems.” My bullshit meter immediately goes off when any company dismisses any problem as being solved in an unspecified way by unspecified proprietary technology. If there was ever an application that demanded utterly unproprietary, utterly transparent solutions, open for all to see and completely beyond reproach, it’s voting technology.
(And, as an aside, one of the reasons given against printers on voting machines is that printers break down all the time, and are utterly unreliable. Gosh, has Diebold told their ATM customers that?)
We’re living in a 50%/50% country these days. Elections like 2000 Florida are likely to become more common, not less. If there was ever a time that we needed absolute certainty in the integrity of the voting process, it was now. The fact that this debate, on the national level, is breaking along partisan lines is not reassuring. You would think that any national party, regardless of their political views, would be absolutely committed to making sure that elections are honest, wouldn’t you?
Otherwise, there will be serious reasons to doubt the legitimacy of any new government. Countries in which the government is not considered legitimate by a significant portion of the population tend to be unpleasant places to live.
[Update 24 April 2004: Diebold is in deep trouble over their actions in California. The company’s spin on this is a masterpiece. If you are ever arrested for holding up a liquor store, be sure to tell the judge that being charged for it “doesn’t solve the problem. It just sets a tone of confrontation at a time when we should be working together to address issues with liquor store security.“ Should work great.]
posted 22:15