Friday, December 26, 2008

Security problems in Voting Machines?

Who would have seen that coming? Well, it seems not officials from the Great State of Maryland, who are suing the vendor to recover the cost of fixing the darn things.
The claim against Texas-based Premier, formerly Diebold, alleges that state elections officials were forced to spend millions of dollars to address a host of security flaws in the machines from 2003 through the November election.
So no big deal, right? I mean, what could possibly have gone wrong?
Many of the problems could have compromised the integrity of the election had they not been fixed, officials said. Now the state wants its money back.
Oh.

You know, I don't see what's wrong with the old paper ballots. Yes, it takes longer to count. Yes, things become hairy if the election is super close like in 2000. But you can't have them, you don't have to have thousands of system administrators to cover technical problems at the polling stations, and you simply don't have questions about whether the election results can be trusted - the system is transparent, in that you don't need a MIT PhD to understand how the totals were computed.

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