| Tuesday, November 2, 2004 |
11:56 - Well, that's done
|
(top)  |
Long lines at the Vineland Library. Very civilized. I recognized a lot of faces from around the neighborhood, including the guy who drove his Ferrari F360 to the polling place. (How does the Ferrari-owning demographic poll, I wonder?)
The touch-screen machines (by Sequoia Voting Systems, not Diebold) were actually very slick. They activate a card with a little embedded chip, which you stick in the machine; when you're done checking your little circles, it writes the results to the card, and you take it back to the guy and get your sticker. ...Or at least that's what we're led to believe it does; no paper trail and all. That's what's so insidious about these systems: they're so cool and efficient and seem so foolproof that people tend to blind themselves to the huge glaring inherent flaw: there's no way to audit what actually gets reported of your ballot to the registrar. For all you know, each machine just writes out a bunch of scrambled garbage to the card when you're done voting, and as long as the software tells you you're done, who's to know? It's not as though we've never dealt with software bugs like that before.
But, well, if you're a voter advocacy group that's all up in arms over butterfly ballots and hanging chads in Florida, you and your group are going to demand a massive overhaul of the system to make it more foolproof—and are you really going to demand that they whip out the Scantron forms or the photocopied sheets with the boxes for check marks and #2 pencils? Or are you going to demand the latest and greatest, highest-tech systems just entering the market? What's your dues-paying group going to tell you to push for? What are people going to viscerally think is a better system, when what they're worried about is a perceived risk of human election officials tampering with the ballots, "losing" them selectively, leaving boxes of them in trunks of cars, et cetera? Will they press you to ask for a system that increases reliance on painstaking human interaction, or decreases it to the fullest extent possible?
Beh. We'll see how it works out. I'm sure a whole bunch of people will suddenly realize the folly of computerized voting in a flash of insight sometime around 8:00 PM tonight.
|
|
Brian Tiemann
