Wednesday, November 13, 2002

Low-level worry of the day
Computerized voting.

One of the things I read regularly (namely, the comp.risks digest) has had quite a bit of coverage about voting machines in the days before and after the election, and it's made me much more aware of the problems that are going on. While I don't quite subscribe to the "voting machines are a plot by to rig elections!" theory of thinking, the truth is that I'm inherently highly suspicious of these systems, especially when they're pathetically lacking any kind of redundancy, as seems to be the case.

It also annoys the heck out of me that the CEOs of these voting-machine companies are going around making statements like, "No one's discovered a problem in our systems," when the reason for that is that it's a felony to look at a voting machine (presumably to ensure that they can't be tampered with, but sadly this is a two-edged sword). Every system has a problem, and I seriously doubt that they've discovered the magical cure.

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