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Democracy Shouldn’t Require a Ph.D.

Started by TLF · 10 months ago

5 comments

  • Walter_E_Wallis

    2 years ago

    I suspect an old IBMer could play tricks on the patch board of one of the ballot readers, and tossing ballot boxes into the bay isn't high tech.
    reply
  • Brian Moore

    2 years ago

    What boggles my mind is: I'm a programmer -- this isn't hard stuff. The design of a secure, option selecting system is trivial stuff -- banks do far more complex things with billions of dollars every day. Why is it hard to do this? Why are there bugs? You present a hardcoded list of options and count the number of times each button is pressed. Then, allow ZERO physical data access to the machine until the election is over. That's it. Monkeys could program that. What's the problem here?
    reply
  • Luis Villa

    2 years ago

    The push for electronic voting isn't going away, unfortunately- perceived efficiencies and the (very real) problem of paper ballot stuffing will make it inevitable. Might as well push for it to be open source- I think Red Hat ought to take the project on.
    reply
  • Luis Villa

    2 years ago

    Brian: banks and Vegas. Hire a bunch of slot machine guys and they could do this in their spare time :)
    reply
  • dave byrd

    2 years ago

    1st - i am not the diebold guy - though stunned to see my name in lights and associated with this outfit.

    2nd - the powers that be simply dont want a tamper-proof system - otherwise how could they sell it to foreign 'democracies' for the goal of predetermining their election outcomes. go empire?

    3rd - i would prefer to vote with my cell phone - over 220M cell phones in US today and rising, 72% penetration. Only 122M voted in '04 presidential election or 40% of the population. May disciminate against the poor and uneducated, but they could still go to polling stations. If SSN is linked to account and business phones are excluded, it could ensure "one person - one vote". Although privacy is out the window - but i dont mind.
    reply

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