Diebold takes the already insecure e-voting to the next level. Thier systems support wireless. So now, someone with knowhow and a laptop can fiddle with the e-voting machines from someplace else in the building... or perhaps even from further away when the data goes out over WAN.
Brilliant. Just brilliant.
Rule one of elections: Someone is going to try to cheat.
Corollary: A conspiracy to cheat will involve a small group.
Corollary: By maximizing the number of people representing the maximum number of organizations, you maximize your chance that someone not in the conspiracy will handle the data, and notice discrepancies.
In other words, any e-voting system has to be tightly supervised. There may be a chance for clerical errors in a paper election, but those clerical errors will be random (though there may be purposeful errors as well- but that holds true for any voting system). Random errors most likely will affect all canidates equally, and hence, probably won't affect the outcome. This isn't to say that error is acceptable, but if I have a choice between errors that someone causes purposefully, or ones that are random, I'll go with random.
Brilliant. Just brilliant.
Rule one of elections: Someone is going to try to cheat.
Corollary: A conspiracy to cheat will involve a small group.
Corollary: By maximizing the number of people representing the maximum number of organizations, you maximize your chance that someone not in the conspiracy will handle the data, and notice discrepancies.
In other words, any e-voting system has to be tightly supervised. There may be a chance for clerical errors in a paper election, but those clerical errors will be random (though there may be purposeful errors as well- but that holds true for any voting system). Random errors most likely will affect all canidates equally, and hence, probably won't affect the outcome. This isn't to say that error is acceptable, but if I have a choice between errors that someone causes purposefully, or ones that are random, I'll go with random.
