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15.11.06
Vote-o-Matic
And now for something completely different: An appeal to my readers. Please sign the petition against the usage of voting machines in Germany (if you are a German citizen). Als someone trained in Computer Science I can think of many technical and non-technical reasons why not to use voting machines. Here are a few of them:
- The election is irreproducible. There cannot be a recount, you have to trust the sums output by the machine.
- Unfortunately, there are many ways of manipulating the results. Most voters without any technical background will probably assume that everything just works and cannot be manipulated. This is unfortunately not the case. I find it outrageous that our governments never even mentions possible risks (just like with the new electronic passports).
- The German election system is much more susceptible to manipulation than e.g. the US system. Therefore, we cannot just assume we can directly use their experiences.
- The cost for the machines is rather high, and the usefulness highly dubious. I'm wondering in whose interest it is to introduce such machines.
- The normal way of politics to deal with these problems is to trust that new versions of the devices and more strict security measures will solve the problem. If that would be true, there would be no security issues in web servers, operating systems etc. anymore. A perfect system is only possible in theory, and therefore just the low complexity already makes the paper ballot seems to be the best system.
Here's an interesting report from the US as well as video showing the manipulation of a voting machine (based on research done by Princeton University. And here's a German article.
Posted by crenz, 15.11.06 08:04
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