Steal Your Vote Back?

October 22, 2008 - Leave a comment...

Anyone who can read the sidebar on my website knows who I support for the 2008 presidential election. However, there’s one person I support more than any political candidate: the American voter. As a geek, I’m sick of hearing excuses for why we can’t build a functional voting machine. As a Christian, I’m sick of hearing excuses for why the poor must remain voiceless.

Greg Palast and Bobby Kennedy Jr. just put out this video which helps spotlight some of the areas we need to fix with our voting system.


Steal Back Your Vote! from Greg Palast on Vimeo.

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  • Zimmie

    Really, it is impossible to make a good voting machine. Votes have to be both verifiable and anonymous. Those two goals are completely counter one another and the best way to solve them is physical scarcity. Give everyone one physical item and let them put it in a box. It is highly reliable and remarkably difficult to manipulate as long as you adhere to basic physical security precautions. People have been doing this style of physical security for centuries. We don’t have nearly as much experience with digital security, and it’s a lot harder. Just grep the news for customer data loss and it seems like at least one company loses a laptop with 50,000 customer records or the like every single week.

    Now, physical scarcity can be tied to electronic voting. One idea I had a while ago was simulating an ATM system. Give everyone who registers to vote an account with one virtual dollar in it and let them transfer it to the candidate of their choice. After all, Diebold makes ATMs that banks trust not to screw up the routing numbers on transfers of large amounts of money. This breaks down because either it does not preserve anonymity or it potentially allows people to vote multiple times.

    Another way would be to do something like Kerberos. Give everyone who registered a card which they exchange in a polling place (after showing appropriate authenticators like driver’s license or what-have-you) for a ballot which they then put into a voting machine. They use the machine to pick candidates, which it punches out of the ballot for them. None of this “pregnant chad” business. Now we’re just using the machines as glorified hole punches, and they really aren’t necessary anymore. Proper physical voting design could solve this just as well.

    Voting machines are a product in search of a problem. They are completely unnecessary and all of the current ones have been shown to be untraceable vectors for fraud.