Wednesday, October 18, 2006
High tech voting machines, low tech politics
Summit County voters will mark their ballots electonically on Nov. 7. Do you think the new Diebold machines will be more or less reliable than the old punch cards? Is this the end of democracy or the wave of the future? Add your voice to the online discussion by clicking on "comments."
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4 comments:
I'm against electronic voting. The potential for abuse is far greater than our need to know the elections results within minutes rather than hours. Its too easy to hack or plant code that is bias to a certain party.
I work in the tech industry, and I know from experience that all software and/or hardware can be hacked. These new machines may get the job done, but I'm not convinced that they have been adequately tested. I doubt that we'll ever have an election where the results are not contested, but this system makes the whole process seem sketchy.
The elections industry is the only major industry not routinely subjected to independent manual
audits. In any field, electronic mistakes or tampering would go undetected in the absence of audits.
Please see http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/ElectionIntegrityAudit.pdf
Report after report from major university computer science departments and the results of numerous prior primary and general elections have shown that Diebold machines have lost votes, added fictitious votes, switched votes from one candidate to another and are wide open to hacking. See http://utahcountvotes.org
and
http://kathydopp.com
Inaccurate vote count is an insignificant flaw in the democratic process when choosing a political candidate. There are at least three flaws with more impact. They are:
1). Uninformed voters, which is due mainly to candidates impressing voters with misleading sound-bites, thus getting votes from citizens whose best interests they don't serve;
2). special interest groups using lobbyests and money to influence elected officials; and
3). low voter turn out due in large part to the difficulty in a)understanding the issues, and b)having the ability to associate the issue with the candidate that supports that point of view.
Miscounting the vote may benifit the voter as often as it cheats the voter!
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