This clip from the Simpsons is a timely reminder of the problems still to be ironed out if E-voting is to be trusted.
Curt Wagner blogs at Show Patrol:
Share:Thankfully, the frightfest opens big—as in, Homer not being able to squeeze into a voting booth. He has to use the “double-wide” booth instead, but his problems don’t end there: When he votes for Barack Obama, the machine counts his click as “One vote for McCain.” Homer clicks again and again, and the machine responds “Two votes for McCain,” “Three votes for McCain.” Your vote not being counted correctly? Now that is frightening.
2 Comments
It is funny that the story is about a machine telling you that it has changed your vote into a vote for the other guy.
When machines don’t do this, many people will think that they are working.
But it is much easier, of course, to build a machine that changes your vote without telling you about it. And that is the basic problem with e-voting, and it will take more than a little ironing to fix it.
It’s also pretty much what is happening in some places.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5F-sXW6tCM
Apparently also the voting machines are easy to hack so that, as Jow says, you might never know how your vote has actually been recorded.