Excellent article: "A Technology Too Far"

[livvy]

stillcool47 and kpete did a nice job on the Election Reform Thread today, but this article in particular, I thought was rather good. It is definitely worth a read! Nice find kpete!



A Technology Too Far
Internet Voting?

By Phil Keisling
Issue Date: 05.04.06

Touch-screen, computerized ballots -- officially known as Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting systems -- are not a way station to a glorious, all-Internet future for American democracy. They’re a technology cul-de-sac.

An election system should be accessible, simple, and efficient. But it must also be as secure, risk-free, and confidence-inducing as possible. Reacting to the Florida 2000 election debacle, Congress, through the Help America Vote Act, gave states nearly $3 billion to update their election systems. Great idea. But paper ballots generally -- chads or no -- were deemed suspect. The future of elections, we were told, lay in sophisticated software and user-friendly touchscreens.

For purveyors of expensive, new-fangled election machinery, it was a marketing godsend. For many election officials, federally funded DREs offered an intoxicating vision of elections too precise to be controversial.

Today, this once-bright vision of paperless voting is unraveling. In 2002 and 2004, vexing problems in state after state ran the gamut from lost and miscounted ballots to malfunctioning machines. Diebold, a major DRE manufacturer, inadvertently published its programmers’ source code, betraying not only a serious security breech, but laughably easy-to-hack code.

>more

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=11420

Check out the thread today for more interesting articles, and I'm sure they'd appreciate some recommendations, too!
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x425322

[mcscajun]

1. Love your siggie graphic!

At first I thought it said MOO. :)

[livvy]

2. Ha! Someone else thought it meant impeach lettuce! Thanks! n/t

[Earth_First]

3. I cannot count on my bank to keep accurate online bill payment straight...

However I am supposed to give a bode of confidence to Sequoia, Diebold, ES&S to accurately count my vote towards ensuring a proper democratic government when the same corporations developing the technology are directly tied to the criminal cabal who currently occupy the White House...

...online?

[livvy]

4. This would sure beat what we've got going now...

"Electronic voting is a technology too far. Better to heed the 18th-century wisdom of Benjamin Franklin, who so understood both the power of the visionary -- the invention of modern, representative democracy -- and the promise of the eminently practical, which included the then-revolutionary notion of creating a national postal system.

Use the post office to efficiently deliver ballots. Let voters actually mark the ballots -- and return them via the same post office (or in person). And yes, use computerized machines to count (as opposed to record) the votes. It does save time and money. But always allow the hands, eyes, and brains of real people to make any final decision. It’s not a perfect system -- just the best one we can imagine, right here and now. tap"

I'm not thrilled with machines counting the votes, but at least there is a paper ballot, that could be hand counted. These machines just aren't working, and (finally) more people are beginning to realize how truly undependable and hackable they are. Slow progress, though. It's hard to be patient when you know what is at stake.