Brave New Ballot

[flyingfysh]

I just saw this brand-new book (just published today) mentioned on "comp.risks", an email discussion list for computer people interested in computer risks.

The title is Brave "New Ballot: The Battle to Safeguard Democracy in the Age of Electronic Voting", and the author is Aviel David Rubin. The description on www.amazon.com includes this:

From Publishers Weekly
Rubin, professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins, tells the fascinating story of how he set off a media storm in the summer of 2003 when he and two graduate students revealed that the Diebold electronic voting technology in use in 37 states was riddled with errors and problems. A self-described "computer-geek," Rubin was publicly accused of undermining democracy by officials he describes as desperate to save face after investing state money in the machines. He also became the object of an e-voting industry campaign to smear his work, especially after it was revealed that he had connections to a voting software company. Refreshingly, he describes this potential conflict of interest with considerable candor. Rubin's account of his mounting frustration as governmental and industrial spin doctors continued to champion electronic voting in the face of its manifold problems, and turned electronic voting into a partisan issue, is a sympathetic one. Despite the inability of his critics to understand it, his explanation of the technological issues at the heart of electronic voting is clear, and his argument that votes need to be verifiable in order for the democratic process to be meaningful is so reasonable that it sounds almost revolutionary. (Sept. 5)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

[IndyOp]

1. Avi Rubin is very cool --

Pull The Plug
By Aviel Rubin, Johns Hopkins University
August 18, 2006

You don't like hanging chads? Get ready for cheating chips and doctored drives.

This article appeared on Forbes.com. It is reposted with permission of the author.

I am a computer scientist. I own seven Macintosh computers, one Windows machine and a Palm Treo 700p with a GPS unit, and I chose my car (Infiniti M35x) because it had the most gadgets of any vehicle in its class. My 7-year-old daughter uses e-mail. So why am I advocating the use of 17th-century technology for voting in the 21st century--as one of my critics puts it?

The 2000 debacle in Florida spurred a rush to computerize voting. In 2002 Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, which handed out $2.6 billion to spend on voting machines. Most of that cash was used to acquire Direct Recording Electronic voting machines.

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Avi is the guy at the top of the ACCURATE website, here:
http://accurate-voting.org/people/

[marions ghost]

2. kick

:kick:

[Benhurst]

3. Recommended: #2

[EFerrari]

4. K&R