You asked "Anyhoo, if you can vote electronically why can'y one attach a printer?" That's a good question ... but they didn't do it. So if the machine crashes or has some sort of snafu and the data is lost ... so are you votes.
And mind you, as I voted yesterday there was a yellow "low battery" light flashing on the terminal when I was done. When I brought it to a volunteers attention, he said he knew, and he'd been trying to get someone to tell him what it meant all morning.
I'm often in favor of privatizing government services, but in this case I think the voting machines should have been developed by the federal government (or at least, the state governments based on an agreed upon standard) and released as open source code so that people could see exactly how the system worked. What we've got now is essentially thousands of black boxes that are *supposed* to work correctly, but in truth, we don't know much of anything about how they do what they do. I'm not into conspiracy theories, but IMHO in this case, a little paranoia is a good thing.
Wed, 11/08/2006 - 1:36pm
You asked "Anyhoo, if you can vote electronically why can'y one attach a printer?" That's a good question ... but they didn't do it. So if the machine crashes or has some sort of snafu and the data is lost ... so are you votes.
And mind you, as I voted yesterday there was a yellow "low battery" light flashing on the terminal when I was done. When I brought it to a volunteers attention, he said he knew, and he'd been trying to get someone to tell him what it meant all morning.
That doesn't instill me with a lot of confidence. Neither does the fact that you can open some of these machines using the key from a hotel minibar.
I'm often in favor of privatizing government services, but in this case I think the voting machines should have been developed by the federal government (or at least, the state governments based on an agreed upon standard) and released as open source code so that people could see exactly how the system worked. What we've got now is essentially thousands of black boxes that are *supposed* to work correctly, but in truth, we don't know much of anything about how they do what they do. I'm not into conspiracy theories, but IMHO in this case, a little paranoia is a good thing.
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