Paper Trails Don't Ensure Accurate E-Voting Totals?

Slashdot | Paper Trails Don't Ensure Accurate E-Voting Totals

Now, voter-verifiable paper trails aside...what's with all the hullabaloo about e-voting? Paper isn't good enough? The FL/Chad issue is not present with all paper ballots. My town's ballots are pieces of yellow cardstock with partial arrows: >- -> pointing at candidates and Yes/No options. One takes a sharpie (or other black marker) and fills in an arrow. The ballots are then fed through a high-speed reader (basically a barcode reader writ-large) and votes are tallied. The ballots are durable and easily hand-recounted, which happens often, anyway.

Seriously, what's so wrong with that? People can screw up the ballots? Yes, but that's on the voter, not on some random company writing code that they don't let anyone look at (and it's isn't easily verified if it's even the code running on the machines) that likely has vested political interests, anyway ::choughDieboldcough::

Just because a bunch of idiots designed some terrible paper ballots doesn't mean all paper ballots are the devil. Most people think computers are magic and either trust or distrust them implicitly. Paper ballots are easily understood by anyone and do not qualify as 'magic' by any means.


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Finally!

California Secretary of State - Voting Systems Review

These kinds of things, 'red team attacks' and 'going through the source code' needed to be done from day one, and instead they're being done some 6-7 years later.

But hey, it's only democracy, right? When have accurate votes ever been required?

OMFG Diebold... Cont'd

Judge denies Diebold request to block ES&S pact with Massachusetts

Diebold 0; Massachusetts 3

Yay.

Seriously, good to know something still works around here, Diebold made frivolous claims that were a thinly veiled attempt to keep their claws around the throat of democracy. Luckily, a judge saw fit to work at loosening them a bit.

You go, California!

New California e-voting measure uses hackers to test voting machine security

Seriously, voting machines, if we're going to insist on electronic ones, should get hammered harder than an unprotected Windows box on the public internet, before they're deployed, and the companies that make them should welcome such attacks and then immediately fix those vulnerabilities. I mean, would you put yourself or your friends or family into a car whose manufacturer had refused to send to independent crash testing facilities? No, that's ludicrous, but that's just what Diebold and other's have done. They hold America's Democracy in their grubby little hands and then glare at us and lean closer to their desk whenever we try and look over their shoulder.

Anyone who ever honestly thought and said that voting machines ought to be a black box should be hanged, or at least deported.

I applaud California for both their Zero-Tolerance policy regarding voting machine manufacturer misconduct (this is one of the few places I'm 100% in favor of 'Zero Tolerance' policies) as well as further requiring (well, proposing to require) such intensive testing.

OMFG Diebold...

Diebold is Suing Massachusetts!

So, let me get this straight, Diebold, you're so used to everyone buying your crappy products that are on their way to ruining democracy in the US, that when someone picks someone else to supply voting machines, you sue?

""We want a judge to either order the contract awarded to Diebold, based on his review of the proposals, but if he does not want to go that far, to at least order a reopening of the competition," [Diebold] said.

Weisberg said the company is not alleging any improprieties by the secretary of state's office. Instead, it is saying the office acted in good faith but made a mistake in the selection."

Thank Goodness!

Trust me when I say that they are neither able, nor should be, trusted with enabling America's democratic process.

Oh, and Diebold? Your reputation is already tarnished, getting out of the e-voting business can only keep it from getting any worse, until you screw up royally somewhere else.

From the same people who brought you a series of tubes...

...politicians.

Voting Machines Banned by Dutch Minister (Good for the Dutch, btw)

Seriously, what's so bad about paper ballots, fundamentally? Nothing really.
Poor implementations of anything can be bad, just look at all those goofy attempts at planes back in the day? The ones with like, a hundred wings, or a big steam engine? (IE punch-card ballots) Just because those didn't work and are hilarious to look at today, doesn't mean that we should move to an electronic voting scheme.

Something I think a lot of people don't realize, is that it's a computer that initially counts your votes, anyway. It's not people. In my town, you take a yellow (I think) piece of card stock with a bunch of incomplete arrows (missing the middle segment), a sharpie, and you fill in the arrow for the candidate/issue you're voting for. Nice, simple, no hanging chads, easily verifiable by anyone who looks at it, and uses a simple bar-code scanner, basically, to record votes.
The whole punch-card system seemed a really bass-ackwards way of voting to begin with, like needing to use gunpowder, a fuse and a match to start your car, rather than the battery/electric motor we all know and love.

I think we just need more engineers in government.