In Wired's artcle Wired News: Nevada's Seamless E-Vote, right in the first sentence it calls the machines "ATM-like" and yet everyone seems worried that it is impossible to make these machines reliable. "Printers are too expensive" they say. "Printers complicate things and poll workers won't know how to use them".
To which of course I ask: for real, how are these machines different than ATM's? I've seriously never seen an ATM "glitch". ATM's print receipts and those seem to work ok. If I can deposit $200 in an envelope, part cash part checks, and that $200 appears in my account statement online 3 seconds later, you'd think these clowns could make a voting machine. Instead, all we hear are "whoops, it didn't record any votes for the last half hour". "Woops, somebody browsed to our website to download a demo, edited the url to get rid of the filename, and saw a directory listing including all of the plaintext files containing everyone's voting records". "Woops, that same folder is in our public FTP space and people could upload their own BS, including modifying people's voting records on the spot".
I've never seen an atm "forget" my deposit. I've never known a bank to leave my bank account records in a ridiculously readable/writable FTP folder. So why should the one be so much harder than the other?
Why should it be impossible to train poll workers on how to maintain a receipt printer? Safeway trains minimum wage teenagers to maintain those can return machines outside. Fred Meyers and Wal-mart train minimum wage (or less?) employees to administrate 4 self-serv checkout lanes at a time.
And then of course I loved this gem, in regards to having the paper trail: "In a small precinct, it would be easy to sit and observe what order people voted in."
Everything else aside (the ballot has been all-paper for centuries now, etc) I can't see why they don't print bar codes instead of plaintext results. accompany the bar codes with numbers in case the bars get smudged. If anything that would also dramatically speed up any recount attempts. And if you can't train a poll worker to maintain a receipt printer (we had 3 of them at McDonalds when I worked there) you can't expect them to know how to decode barcodes in their heads.
Posted by jesse at September 14, 2004 01:18 PMVery well put, Jesse. Maybe someone with deep experience from either the banking or elections ends of the world can explain why what seems to be a lock on one hand is so problematic in the other?
Posted by: Barney at September 14, 2004 08:58 PMI just don't get why we can't decide on one simpler way and all do it. Is that so hard?
Posted by: DeAnn at September 14, 2004 10:57 PMDeAnn: By "simpler" do you mean non-electronic, or electronic yet straightforward? I'm all in favor of getting out the big scales from Ducktales s1e30 "Working for scales" and put everyone for bush on one side, and then everyone for kerry on the other side, and then see which side goes downward.
Of course I only say this because I weigh an eighth of a ton :) Or maybe it's because if we can find all the pro-bush yahoo's in such a fashion we could deport them to iraq (you know, they can sleep in the bed they made ;) but I digress.
Posted by: Jesse Thompson at September 15, 2004 01:42 AM