[Osx-nutters] Election 2004 was rigged

[David Cake]

>I hope the lawsuit is pursued to a conclusion.
>
>What stuns me is  the resistance to paper tape backup for the 
>electronic machines.
>
>Whatever the machine says is taken as gospel, with no real way to verify it.
>
>This isn't a partisan issue.  Or at least it shouldn't be.
>
>I want to know that the elections a fair, whether my side wins or 
>looses is not the point.

	Indeed. A view not shared by a great deal of the Republican 
leadership, I feel (not that the Democrats are necessarily better, 
but whether they are less inclined to rig elections or just not as 
good at it is unknown at this point), but a laudable one.

>I think electronic voting 'could' be less error prone, but I'd 
>rather see an open-source version on standard hardware
with paper tape backup..

	In Australia, we do
- paper voting at the booths
- centralised vote counting electronically, generally sufficient in 
95% or so of cases to declare a result on the night of the election 
for most single candidate positions (multiple candidate positions, 
like our Senate, are another matter, and generally take several days)
- manual, laborious, hand counting in disputed elections - which 
takes a few weeks, but you generally need to wait for that for postal 
ballots etc.
	I think electronic counting at the point of voting would be a 
significant improvement. But I would not like to see the hand counted 
option disappear. Nor do I think its likely.

>   Oh, and a guard that protects the machines once they have been 
>certified as being ready to be used..

	Of course, an electoral body that isn't controlled by 
partisan appointees, and is trustable, would be even better.

Kevin wrote
>should the source code be open-source ?

	What matters is thats its auditable, and auditable by anyone 
who has an interest. Issues of the right of reuse (which are central 
to open source as understood generally, and creative commens, etc) 
are secondary. Intellectual property encumberment is only a primary 
issue in so far as it interferes with electoral bodies to make use of 
the software (which is does for Diebold etc, but need not), but free 
auditing of source code is essential for true public confidence.
	And frankly, there should be no significant trade secrets in 
such code. Voting is well understood, the rest of the functioning of 
the machines is trivial.
	And the idea that security is increased by obscurity applies 
only when there are known flaws.
	Cheers
		David