Want fraudless e-voting? Import the software.

[jmowreader]

I'm serious. Have the tabulator program and the voting-terminal program--the heart of the whole e-voting thing--written outside the country.

At present, if I remember my Black Box Voting correctly, there are four companies who make electronic voting equipment: Sequoia, Diebold, Election Systems & Software, and one whose name I don't remember. Of the four, Diebold and ES&S are running the same software.

All four of these companies are owned by Republicans, and one of them is, or at least WAS, owned by a sitting senator who was initially elected on his own machines. These boxes will always be suspect, in much the same way that a Republican secretary of state certifying a 200-vote Republican victory is.

I feel we wouldn't have the same level of suspicion over a machine whose software was written in Norway or some other country we weren't outsourcing jobs to. I don't think some computer geek in Oslo or Naples really cares who wins the sheriff's race in Transylvania County, North Carolina. (It's a real place.)

If we get one nice, easy-to-implement, certified suite of e-voting software that was written by someone who doesn't care who the senator from Maryland is, and that runs on a slightly modified department-store PC (slightly modified means "you have to take the modem card out"), we could implement e-voting without worrying about it automatically electing Republicans no matter who got the majority of the vote.

The country SHOULD be on regular old paper ballots, or old lever machines. They're the best way. But if we HAVE to have e-voting, this is better than buying the shit from the guy who pledged to deliver Ohio for Bush.

[aquart]

1. That's so adorable.

You write as if you've never heard of international cartels.

[jmowreader]

5. Of course I've heard of international cartels

[bowens43]

2. doesn't matter where its written, it can be hacked,

[Peace Patriot]

3. Point taken. It's absurd! But the key is the audit--er, a PAPER BALLOT and

a substantial audit. In Venezuela, they vote electronically but they hand-count FIFTY-FIVE PERCENT of the paper ballot backup, cuz they don't trust the machines. Why don't we do that? It's nuts that we don't. If we did that much of an automatic hand-count (audit), it wouldn't matter who made the software, or that it was TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY software, owned and controlled by Bushite corporations. Well, maybe it would matter. We've got billions and billions of our tax dollars poured into corporations whose owners make boffo contributions to Bush-Cheney and other fascist campaigns. So that's not good (ya think?). But I mean from the point of view of verifiable elections--the audit is the key.

You know how much of the vote WE audit? 0% to 1%, depending on how much of a stranglehold Diebold/ES&S have on local election officials and legislators. 0% to 1%! Are we crazy?

[rman]

4. Make the software publicly auditable,

(aka open source) so that the election process is transparent as it is supposed to be, and as it once was.