In California, the state will decide on what it is going to do with its voting machines, and what additional security measure it might employ, or one hopes, turf electronic voting all together. Florida is also plagued by errant voting machines, that despite claims of being fixed, still are not working properly, or safely.
(Tallahassee, Florida) Florida’s optical scan voting machines are still flawed, despite efforts to fix them, and they could allow poll workers to tamper with the election results, according to a government-ordered study obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press. (source)
You would think, nearly 8 years after the ‘hanging chad‘ debacle, that at least Florida would be making headway in preventing becoming a laughing stock again. Guess not, because it seems everyone is in love with the concept of E-Voting. Nice thought, but shouldn’t the concern be more about preserving Democracy and the principle that one person’s vote can make a difference?
With electronic voting, it seems that who gets the best computer hacker, is who will win, not how many actual votes they get. That is the reality of today’s electronic love affair. If the big computer players like Microsoft and others, are unable to secure their own systems, would seem logical that you won’t be able to secure voting machines either. And as for those security measures, well, they are only as good as the people working the polling stations, and in their integrity.
Can you really see a worker, who adamantly opposes Pro Choice, being in a position of altering the election from a Pro Choice candidate to a Pro Life candidate, not being tempted to do so? Specially if they know they can’t be caught? Specially if they know that it is nearly impossible to tell if a machine has been altered or hacked?
If you believe that can’t happen, then explain the recent Florida election for Congress, where 14,000 votes simply fell off the computer records. Go back and re-live the 2004 Presidential election, and all the conspiracy theories that exist about that one, then come back, and say electronic voting is better than a simple paper ballot.
Want Democracy? Use Paper not a Computer to decide who will govern, and who won’t.
