QUESTIONS RAISED ABOUT ELECTRONIC VOTING SYSTEMS David Dill, a computer science professor at Stanford University, has voiced concerns over direct recording electronic machines, already used in some spots in the United States for elections. The machines, argues Dill, offer no verifiable paper trail to validate results. Computer bugs or malicious intervention could result in inaccurate election results, he said, with no way of going back and finding out what the actual counts were. Defenders of the machines said they are thoroughly tested, do not allow voters to accidentally vote for multiple candidates in the same race, and can be installed with printers so that voters can see exactly how their ballots were cast. Dill dismissed those arguments, however, saying oversight is lax and that information necessary to have confidence in an election is kept away from the public. Federal Computer Week, 25 July 2003 http://www.fcw.com/geb/articles/2003/0721/web-dre-07-25-03.asp
I cast my vote with the doubters. But I don't trust manual systems, either.
As my manager said to me today when I asked him how I should handle some condition in our program that cannot occur, he said that since it could not occur it was not an issue. But he tolerated me puting in code to report the condition provided I aded a comment that the code could never get executed. And what did I see a few minutes later that I had already seen earlier in the day.... --
There has ben no computer revolution.
The computer has been one of the most
powerful forces for social reaction in the
20th century (by enabling existing
bureaucratic social organizations to
live on after the volume of
data to be handled exceded the
capacity of human clerks to process,
which situation, without the computer,
would have resulted in either social
break-thru or breakdown).
(--Joseph Weizenbaum)\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----------------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
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