Electronic Voting: On the Way Out
I found an interesting bit of news over at Engadget. Apparently Ohio is joining the ranks of Florida and California in saying that electronic voting is no longer wanted. Here it is straight from Engadget:
Like California and Florida before it, habitual swing state Ohio has just issued a report slamming its three providers of electronic voting equipment — including, of course, renamed Diebold — and recommending that the 50 counties which use them scrap the machines in favor of a paper-trail-leaving optical scanning method. The report, commissioned by Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, details the ways in which white hat hackers were able to infiltrate the systems, easily picking locks, using portable devices to manipulate vote counts, and even introducing “malignant software” into boards of election servers
In my opinion this is an excellent move. there are simply too may problems is the voting machines, especially given the fact that two of the ‘competing’ companies are owned by siblings. I also suggest watching Man of the Year with Robin Williams for a great example of electronic voting failing in fiction. It is much less depressing than thinking of it failing in reality.
Hopefully more states will join up and demand accountability in elections. Paper trails are an absolute necessity.
