On Apr 30, 2012, at 7:02 PM, Paul Kislanko wrote:
On 04/29/2012 04:48 AM, Dave Ketchum wrote:
Computers do well at performing the tasks they are properly told to
perform - better than humans given the same directions. Thus it would
make sense to direct the computers and expect them to do what is
needed accurately.
Still, we sometimes wonder exactly what the computers have been
told to
do.
In my original suggestion THAT aspect of "verifiability" is covered
by the
notion that if all ballots are made a public record, independent
programmers
could perform whatever algorithm is the counting-method against the
input.
If 1000 members of EM (or one media outlet like CNN) got a different
result
than the vote-counting authority published, we'd know there was a
counting
error in the "official" computer code. And that would happen within
minutes,
not weeks.
Automatically trusting CNN, or any other single source, with automatic
credit for being more dependable than an official authority program is
stretching it.
As I wrote earlier, a program can be rigged to give either a correct
or a biased result, as cued, with existence of the cue being hidden
from observers.
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