The poll workers, many senior citizens who had spent decades setting up low-tech punch-card systems, were baffled by the new computerized system and the rather poorly written manuals from Diebold and the county. “It was insane,” one former poll worker told me. “A lot of people over the age of 60, trying to figure out these machines.”
(NYTimes)
In a remarkably condescending fashion some guy named Clive Thompson (who writes frequently about technology) tells us all about those new-fangled electrical voting machines just in time to once again do nothing much about them (yeah, right, California, Colorado, one county in Ohio, something something). Must be getting close to election time again.
The earliest critiques of digital voting booths came from the fringe — disgruntled citizens and scared-senseless computer geeks...
Thanks, Clive.
It’s difficult to say how often votes have genuinely gone astray. Michael Shamos, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who has examined voting-machine systems for more than 25 years, estimates that about 10 percent of the touch-screen machines “fail” in each election. “In general, those failures result in the loss of zero or one vote,” he told me. “But they’re very disturbing to the public.”
Really? Go on.
Of course if ten percent of the voting machines in some states fail by one vote it could make a considerable difference. And if just a few...well, even Clive can see...
Most famously, in the November 2006 Congressional election in Sarasota, Fla., touch-screen machines recorded an 18,000-person “undervote” for a race decided by fewer than 400 votes.
Here's the bottom line. Until the software in those machines is made public, if you vote on one your vote is being counted by a third party who you do not know and whose count you have no way to observe or verify. And as long as that's true there is really no way you can trust the results.
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