Florida officials: Some voting records wiped out
You know me, I’m a victim of techno-lust. If there’s a way to mechanize something, anything, I’m all for it. There should be more whirring and clanking noises in my life! More beeps! More flashing LED’s! But the current crop of electronic voting machines is a travesty. Tech for tech’s sake is a shame, and these machines, designed by companies that have the capability and knowledge to actually make them trustworthy and reliable, are anything but. It’s not that hard to add in a printer with a long roll of paper held behind a thick glass where a voter can verify that his vote did, indeed, go through, and that can be manually verified in case of a recount. Hell, give me 5 minutes, I can code it. Make the code that counts my freakin’ votes Open Source so I know what’s going in there, and set up some basic certification mechanism so I can verify that the code that went into the machine is the code I saw, and I’ll be happy. But until that happens, we’re all at the mercy of events like the one described in this CNN.com article: CNN.com - Florida officials: Some voting records wiped out.
