More and more stories of e-voting problems from this past election are now emerging. One North Carolina county is going to have a second election because so many votes were lost. Slashdot just carried a story about a programmer who wrote (or modified?) a touch-screen voting system that could silently alter votes.
This stuff scares the bejesus out of me. The only people who want e-voting with no possibility of definitive records being kept are:
- vendors who produce the e-voting systems
- policy-makers who have fielded such systems
I won’t speculate here on their rationale why they feel that a computer does not need stringent and verifiable record keeping, but I will say that the entire computer science community (as well as many others) has just about unamimously said that this is a Bad Idea.
In other news, Branden (whose dancing name is “Ginger”) just started a blog. Woot! Welcome to the wonderous world of MoveableType.
Mmm… blogging yummyness.