Oh e-voting, is there any system it can’t corrupt?
I did a double take when I saw they were considering Internet voting for Parliamentary elections. Good God, are they idiots, or do they want ruined elections? E-voting is unsuitable for anything more serious than who people think will supplant Britney Spears as the next queen of teen pop.
(Diebold) Electronic touch screen voting machines are part of a system of fraud. The fraud happens right in front of the voter/user, on a dedicated voting machine. The voter can’t even see their marked ballot go into a container for verification in the event of computer fraud! It’s a sham. Even if the system is created in good faith, there are too many points of untraceable data corruption, for an event that is darn near perfected in Canada using paper and pencils.
To suggest that Internet voting machines would be any better is a crock. The voter can’t confirm that their ballot is correct, and it’s not like they can print their own confirmation page like it’s some kind of e-commerce transaction. People could just forge their confirmation slips.
After stories like this, is there anyone who stands by electronic voting?
Fraud was reported in Brazil’s 2006 e-voting election by an
article just published in Brazil this week by VejaThe Veja text (in Portuguese) says that:
* more than 1/3 of the DREs used in the state of Alagoas show signs of criminal manipulation. …
If anyone tells you that electronic voting will make your election easier and more democratic… run, run from them like the wind, and cover your ears to keep out the lies. If you think that’s being overly dramatic, maybe, but is the point made yet? E-voting is fine for blogs, but when lives depend on it, don’t you dare use it.
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April Reign | 30-Jan-07 at 8:27 am | Permalink
The lack of serious concern regarding democracy is extremely worrying.
JimBobby | 30-Jan-07 at 8:35 am | Permalink
Whooee! Here in my county in SW Ontariariario, we had sum sorta electronic deals countin’ votes in the municipal electionvote last fall. It was paper ballots that were fed inta a machine that registered an’ counted ‘em. I reckon the only thing they did good was count faster but I can’t say if they was accurate or not. They did leave a paper trail.
This touch screen thing sounds really bad an’ didn’t it turn out that US enemy Chavez had a lotta stock in one o’ the big companies makin’ these outfits? Polyticians o’ any kind in the biz ain’t good, sez I.
JB
Saskboy | 30-Jan-07 at 11:43 pm | Permalink
Yes very, April. Hopefully they learn from the State’s mistakes.
We had the electronic paper scanning machines for the last civic election too JB. I made a crack about it, and the polling officer didn’t understand my joke/comment about it so I didn’t bother explaining it.
I think the scanning kind may be OK, so long as the sheets are either counted entirely, by hand later, or a random sample is conducted, and if the final tally is outside of (maybe) 2% off, then a full count is triggered.
North of 49 | 01-Feb-07 at 12:58 am | Permalink
We’ve got those optical scanners in my muni too, and I did ask, and they do indeed do random sampling, so like you SB I’m sort of OK with it. I still don’t know how results are transmitted from the polling stations and how secure the central tabulating software is.
Assuming the system is secure, though, one nice thing about those machines is the immediate error-checking. If, say, you vote both Yes and No on a referendum question (yep, I did), or vote for 5 council seats instead of 4, the machine spits it right back out and you get to try again (red-faced). In the old paper days that part of the ballot would have counted as spoiled.
But. DREs for something as absurdly simple as making one mark on onepiece of paper? Insane.