Problem

[Derek Martin]

On Wed, Apr 21, 2004 at 10:37:45AM -0400, Travis Roy wrote:
> That was kind of my point. How do you know those things are not flawed 
> in some way, or fixed? How do you know if it counted your vote 
> correctly? Forget about new fangled computers, I'm talking about 
> exsisting systems. What if something happened and it switches Dems for 
> Reps or something like that.. Unless a recount is demanded we would 
> really never know.

The thing is, no solution is better.  You're going to depend on people
to be reliable?  We all know that humans make mistakes with tedious
counting FAR more often than computers do (assuming the program is
correct).  And computers don't lie -- they always give the true
answer, where true means the answer they were programmed to deliver.
But people /do/ lie.  I think Ben's right...  The most reliable
solution is to FORCE the ballot software vendors to release their code
for public scrutiny.

Even with that though, there's no guarantee that the people tallying
the computer results are honest and have no agenda...  Or that the
people in charge of releasing the code actually release the REAL
code...  In the end, no solution is perfect, especially where people
are involved.

But in the end, it doesn't matter anyway.  Because all the candidates
are the same, interested only in maintaining the status quo, and not
interested in solving hard problems, and certainly not interested in
representing YOU (unless you have a million dollars to donate to their
wallet^H^H^H^H^H^Hcampaign).  It doesn't matter who you vote for, or
who gets elected, or if those two things match up...  Oh, sure, there
ARE differences, but mostly in areas that are only important enough to
be distracting from the real issues that face society.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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