use Perl

• Voting Systems (Score:2)

  by ziggy (25)

  One solution he brings up is voting receipts so people have a record. I think that is a good idea, but not the solution.

  Every time the topic of electronic voting in the US comes up (or the farce of the 2000 Florida ballot), some wry englishman mentions, "Paper ballots still work perfectly fine for us. We get the results that night, we have accountability, and the damn things don't need to be rebooted."
  • Voting in the UK is a Farce! (Score:1)

    by chromatic (983)

    I mean, they don't vote for the Queen, do they?
    • Re:Voting in the UK is a Farce! (Score:2)

      by Dom2 (2981)

      Ah, now you've picked up on the curious english tradition of the Royal Family. No, we don't vote for them, but that's because they don't matter.

      I think the closest thing to voting for Royals is paying for tabloids with the juiciest stories on them...

      -Dom
      • Re:Voting in the UK is a Farce! (Score:1)

        by chromatic (983)

        You should probably watch more Monty Python, at least until my previous comment is mildly amusing. :)
        • Re:Voting in the UK is a Farce! (Score:2)

          by hfb (74)

          The British, especially the over 30 crowd, don't generally obsess over Monty Python the way yankees do...it's almost as tired as Elvis sightings. :)
  • Re:Voting Systems (Score:2)

    by BooK (2612)

    I'm not English, but I have big doubts about electronic voting. The bigger of them being accountability.

    Open source software sure can help, but it's far more difficult to stuff ballots in every city of the country (in France, there are volonteers (scrutateurs) that check that everything is OK and do the counting after the poll has ended) than to quietly hack the central database.

    On the other hand, I don't think we have more than 3 or 4 ballots a year, the big years. And we vote for one person or a list of
• Open Source Voting Project: EVM (Score:2)

  by Ovid (2709)

  There is an open-source voting project named EVM. There was an announcement to the main Python list back in August [lwn.net] and the project can be inspected here [sourceforge.net].

  One of the core ideas in this project is that every machine should produce a paper receipt. I think this is very important because the debate on electronic voting often centers around "bugs" and "secure software" and many people who talk about this miss the core issue of risk management. Since there is no such thing as secure software, we have to ask
• Avi Rubin (Score:2)

  by brian_d_foy (44)

  Nat pointed me at Avi Rubin, who then pointed me at a very thorough, and academic, analysis of Diebold's crap [avirubin.com]. They actually got the C++ source, and they do not have nice things to say about either C++ or the code.
  
  He has a list of questions [avirubin.com] customers should ask about voting machines. He included a note about whether the public can inspect the source.
• Get your Representative to co-sponsor H.R. 2239 (Score:1)

  by md5 (3112)

  Although this bill [loc.gov] has been primarily touted for the voter verification and auditing provisions related to using paper receipts as the official vote of record, it also contains the following language (from the text [loc.gov] of the bill):

  Sec 4.a.2.C SOFTWARE AND MODEMS-

  (i) No voting system shall at any time contain or use undisclosed software. Any voting system containing or using software shall disclose the source code of that software to the Commission, and the Commission shall make that source code available