Monday, November 28, 2005

Still With The Voting Problems

Brad Friedman writes in the Huffington Post about voting problems. It seems in the last Ohio election 4 ballot questions failed by large margins in spite of the fact that pre-election polling showed they would win by large margins. There are a number of explanations for this and we don't know what the answer is. But it does point out troubling problems with electronic voting machines.

There's no reliable audit trail and the software is proprietary, meaning no one knows what it does. It should be open source, so that any programmer could read it and be sure it does what it should be doing. Before you express doubts of problems here, you should know that the CEO of Diebold said in 2003 he's "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." Why should the most public of actions depend on proprietary secrets?

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