[ale] Is there any way to stop this travesty? -- NO, of course not!

[Joseph A. Knapka]

"SanMillan, Todd" wrote:
> 
> The deeper problem with electronic voting is the lack of an audit trail.
> See RISKS LIST http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/21.12.html#subj1.1 for an
> intro.  These are all closed source systems that are "self-auditing".
> Meaning that once the election results are reported, there is no possibility
> of a recount to verify results.  If there are systemic problems, how can you
> rely on the system to find and report errors?

Gosh, I hope I'm misundertanding what you're saying here.

Why would anyone, even a politician, ever -consider- the use
of a voting system that didn't permit external
auditing of election results? Not only can't you rely on the
system to find and report errors, you can't rely on it not to
-intentionally introduce- errors in order to push an agenda.
Any electronic voting system would have to, at minimum, allow
a voter to verify that their vote was recorded properly (without,
of course, allowing anyone else to do so), at any time after
the vote was cast, IMO.

There would still be room for the processing firm to manipulate
the results, however, since nothing short of a complete manual
count could verify the electronic results, unless further
measures were taken to ensure the integrity of the data. I'm
not sure what those measures would be, though. The very fact
that no one other than the voter should be permitted to
find out the mapping between votes and voters places pretty
strong limits on how much verification can be done. (Of course,
this sort of game can be played with paper ballots as well,
but it would be a great deal more effort, and therefore harder
to conceal.)

-- Joe

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jim [mailto:jcphil at mindspring.com]
> Sent: Friday, August 23, 2002 1:25 PM
> To: Keith R. Watson; Irv Mullins; ale at ale.org
> Subject: Re: [ale] Is there any way to stop this travesty? -- NO, of course
> not!
> 
> On Friday 23 August 2002 01:09 pm, Keith R. Watson wrote:
> > Irv,
> >
> > The quoted article:
> >
> >
> http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/epaper/editions/today/metro_d3569ddbd46e52
> >e d0013.html
> >
> > said the following:
> >
> > "Diebold officials say its machines have been used in elections in
> > Maryland, Virginia, Indiana and California with few reported problems."
> 
> Going back to my earlier comments on systems for financial services,
> Diebold,
> of course has great experience in this area. They were originally a
> manufacturer of safes, but they also make ATM's for banks. ATM networks are
> wonders of redundancy and reliability. So, if anybody could pull this off, I
> 
> would think it would be the people at Diebold.

-- 
  "I'd rather chew my leg off than maintain Java code, which
   sucks, 'cause I have a lot of Java code to maintain and
   the leg surgery is starting to get expensive." - Me

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