I agree. By the way to start a second thread of discussion thats sort of related...
We have electronic voting here in Utah County. I have heard a lot of reports in regards to possible issues with vote fraud due to the easey hackability of electronic voting machines. During the November balloting I was hired as an poll manager, and ran a voting precinct, mostly out of patriotic duty, but also out of concern for the possibility of tampering. I wanted to learn what was really going on with these machines. Let me tell you, Electronic voting in Utah County has numerous safeguards in place to prevent tampering. First of all the memory cards which log each vote, store the information encrypted. Additionally each memory card has a GUID which is logged to a particular machine. So only a single card may be used with a single machine and you could not turn in a "preloaded" card, without foreknowledge of the GUID for that particular card. Secondly there is a paper trail, each machine has what is effectively a "receipt tape", which serves as a second method of logging votes. Thirdly there is a voter register that each voter must sign, essentially saying "I showed up to vote" At the end of the day a report is run, if there is any discrepancy between the number of votes on the machine, in either it's memory card, or it's receipt tape, and the voter register, the poll workers are not allowed to go home, they must strive to resolve the discrepency. In my case we had 1 machine that crashed and required a reboot, this happened in the middle of a person voting. This caused the machine to register 1 extra ballot. (The ballot was a partial), and required the use of a traditional paper ballot to allow the voter to complete his voting. The paper work to reconcile just that single anomaly is pretty hefty stuff and requires the sworn statements of both the poll manager and the assistant manager, at the end of the day. They have policies detailing what to do in the event of any one of numerous possible failure scenarios. Suffice it to say, I am very impressed with the system we have here in Utah County. While not completely "unhackable", it would take a conspiracy at several levels of the election board to throw an election in one direction or the other. Sincerely, Steve On Jan 24, 2008 10:08 AM, Corey Edwards <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Discussing politics of regulating technology: easily on topic. > > Discussing foreign policy: definitely off topic and not likely to bring > about any useful conclusion. > > I respectfully request that we end this tangent to the original thread. > > Corey > > > > /* > PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net > Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug > Don't fear the penguin. > */ > /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
