Repair The Election System.
Today, I voted. Then I took a long shower to feel clean
again. The US voting system, in case you hadn't noticed, is broken. In American:
It don't work good. It is full of machines that are vulnerable to manipulation.
I spent a long time thinking about how to fix the electronic voting machines. I
thought perhaps we could build upon a small variety of Linux, and then install
dual operating systems on computers in local libraries (locked so the physical
box is inaccessible), and design it to only respond to a mouse. If you just
reinstalled the Linux partition shortly before the election, then the computers
could be used most of the year instead of only one day out of every couple of
years.
I thought about whether it was really necessary to keep the votes a secret,
since you can already receive proof of who you voted for when you use an
absentee ballot. But I do think a secret ballot is important, so I
scrapped that concept altogether.
I thought about systems that print out receipts with heavily encrypted bar
codes. You could verify your vote right there by scanning it into a separate
machine. Since the key would be unique to each voter, you could even keep a copy
of your receipt (which you could later verify in private in a local library or
other gov't facility).
I eventually came to the conclusion that until we figure out how to make
computer systems a bit more secure, we ought to just stop going down this path
towards complex voting machines. Why bother?
1. It's very expensive. Why are we spending hundreds of dollars for each machine so it can be used for only one day out of every two or four years?
2. It's not very secure. It seems like almost every day around election time, I read about a new aspect of the vulnerabilities of these machines. Then, after the election, I hear ten or twenty perfectly sound theories of how the election could have been stolen. Of course, nobody has the funding, the resources, or the access to find out whether anything actually happened, only to point out that there are so many holes that one of them was likely exploited.
3. It isn't really that much easier. What's so difficult about marking a box? Use a pen. Better yet, why do we want to make it any easier? It shouldn't be confusing, but what's confusing about writing in a box? If someone can't figure out how to do such a simple thing as coloring a bubble, why do we want their opinion to matter?
4. It
isn't all that much faster anyway. Plenty of countries without electronic
voting count the results within a few days, pending recounts. This seems like
a perfectly reasonable period of time since the new candidate won't enter office
for several months anyway.
Finally, I concluded the following:
You vote
with a paper and pencil.
Mark
your candidate's name with no help.
If
you mess up, you
can ask for
a second or even a third ballot.
No fourth try.
If
you can't figure it out, you don't vote.
You don't count this year. Maybe in another 4.
Count the paper ballots. Count them again. Report the winners.
The End.
As for the voting machines, the way to fix them is to smash them. They were a complete waste of money. Let's fix 'em good.
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© 2006 FussyPucker.