Thursday, June 26, 2003

Electronic voting machines

(I am not the Savage Weiner, though I do take his name in vain.)

This is one of those under-the-radar, quietly-growing-cancer-on-democracy stories...

This I didn't know:

Election.com, a struggling Garden City start-up scheduled to provide online absentee ballots for U.S. military personnel in the 2004 federal election, has quietly sold controlling power to an investment group with ties to unnamed Saudi nationals, according to company correspondence.

Hmm....

Meanwhile, unauditable systems are being jammed through in Seattle.

My ATM transactions can be audited, but not my vote? Is there a way to insist on a paper ballot, even in an electronic jurisdiction?

UPDATE: Here is an informational site on this issue. Electronic voting must be auditable! Voting machine systems (like most of those sold today) that do not leave an audit trail are open invitations to fraud. (Not that anything like that could ever happen!) It's hard to imagine anything more corrosive to our democracy.