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April 27, 2004Be the change…Of recent, there have been lots of discussions about verified voting. There are bills in congress and many state legislatures. Diebold has gotten a lot of bad press for writing a proprietary system that many people consider faulty. While trying to protect voting rights through legislation makes a lot of sense, it strikes me that this is a battle that can be waged on multiple fronts. Last year, Australia had voting using open source software. Scott Ritchie, a California college student, is looking at porting this software to California. His project got a bit of press a few months ago, but I haven’t heard anything from them in a couple months. Are there ways that the Greater Democracy community can help get good open source voting system software ready for primetime and in front of as many decision makers as possible? Comments
Contact Black Box Voting at the url below to get all the details on how each person can help! http://www.blackboxvoting.org/blackboxvotingcgi/dcforum/dcboard.cgi This is extremely important! If our votes are not credited to our candidates, they will win again! Posted by: aRuss at April 27, 2004 2:52 PMThere are a number of good efforts ongoing -- VerifiedVoting.org, blackboxvoting.org (already mentioned), Countthevote.org, truevotemd.org and even TrueMajority has gotten in on the act. Activists tried for many, many months to interest MoveOn in the problem, to no avail (unless they've taken it up recently, which I doubt). It is an urgent problem -- 30% of the electorate will be using these paperless voting machines in November. There have been anomalies just about EVERYWHERE they have been used, some of them astounding (like 3 different Republicans winning their races by exactly 18,181 votes in one TX county in 2002?? c'mon!). Numerous studies -- ignored by MD, GA, and even to too great an extent CA -- have testified to the ease with which these machines can be hacked, and (my far bigger worry) the ease with which malicious code could be embedded or elections rigged by insiders in realtime. The bare minimum is voter-verified paper ballots which can be used for audits and recounts. Even this will not prevent fraud (or errors), but at least there's a backup. Would you trust any bank whose ATM didn't give you a printed receipt? WHY THEN ARE WE TRUSTING THESE REPUBLICAN-BUILT VOTING MACHINES? In fact, why have our Secretaries of State and other election officials privatizing our vote instead of protecting it? Get involved if you care about saving democracy. After all, "you can't vote 'em out if you didn't vote 'em in." Posted by: Eloriel at April 30, 2004 9:26 PMPost a comment
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