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November 03, 2003
Taking Us to School
Though it's only just hit mainstream media, there's been a furor over the past few weeks on Slashdot regarding Diebold and their voting machines. Wired has not posted an article about how Australia set up their electronic voting system, which seems to have gotten things right where the American voting machine manufacturers seem to be determined to get it wrong.
For a country that claims to be so strongly based on democracy and foists it on just about anyone it can, it's shockingly disappointing to sense the general apathy toward the infringement on the integrity of the voting process that these machines pose. Matt Quinn, lead engineer of the Australian system, probably says it best:
"The only possible motive I can see for disabling some of the security mechanisms and features in their system is to be able to rig elections. It is, at best, bad programming; at worst, the system has been designed to rig an election."Actually, Quinn's got quite a few good things to say about voting and democracy in general. The cynical part of me rather liked this one, regarding the rest of the world being able to participate in US elections:
"After all, we've all got a stake in who's in the White House these days. I'm actually prone to think that the rest of the world should get a vote in your elections since, quite frankly, the U.S. policy affects the rest of the world so heavily."
Posted by KinCross at November 3, 2003 02:20 PM