Now that Johns Hopkins and Rice universities have found that the electronic voting systems being adopted by counties all over the country are extremely vulnerable to tampering by gifted (and maybe even not-so-gifted) hackers, doesn't this idea make sense?
Activists are demanding that ballot machine vendors include printers that produce paper receipts so citizens can confirm that paper results match their touch-screen choices. Receipts would go into a county lock-box for use in recounts.
As I've said before, I don't plan to head down to Conspiracy Theory Menswear and have myself fitted for a tin foil hat over this stuff any time soon. But Diebold Election Systems, the leading manufacturer of this equipment, really isn't doing itself any favors by opposing reasonable suggestions like the one outlined above -- particularly given the fact that the company is headed by a strong political partisan.
In a mature democracy like ours, elections have to be like Caesar's wife; the perception that they're clean is every bit as important as the underlying reality. And until Diebold accepts that basic truth and begins to act on it, opposition to their machines will only continue to grow.
Posted by Jack O'Toole on October 6, 2003 07:04 AMLast week I voted in the Ontario election. I got a piece of paper with a list of names on it, put an X in a box next to my preferred candidate's name, and put the paper in a sealed box. After the polls closed, they sorted the pieces of paper and counted them. Even though it was all done manually, they were able to get all the ballots counted within a couple of hours.
Voting machines have always struck me as a solution in search of a problem. I don't understand why there is so much discussion about which high-tech machine to use when there is a secure, anonymous, and auditible low-tech solution available.
Posted by: dmm on October 6, 2003 08:46 AM