Creepy Voting
You know that creepy feeling you get when you are walking down an alley and someone else walks into the end? That was the feeling I got at the polling place today from Moore supporters. I was walking down the street when from across the street comes, moving very quickly, a Moore supporter yelling at me to remember to vote for Joe waving a brick of fliers that looked like it could hurt somebody if they weren’t careful. Supposedly Joe was inside, but I didn’t see him (there were multiple precincts at my polling place). But I did see his doughnuts. Mmm doughnuts. Well I had to get me some of those. Dunkin had a great banner up: “Get two dozen, make friends the easy way.” Made me laugh.
On the conspiracy side, I tried out the electronic voting machine. I figured it was less likely that Sequoia would try anything at a local election. It also had a very nice voter verifiable paper trail, though I was a little annoyed that that step was optional. To make this stuff really work, precincts need to me selected at random for a manual paper recount to match against the central numbers. And for that to work, there has to be a complete paper trail. Well I hit it, so hopefully if they are messing with the numbers, that flags mine as “needs to be correct”. All in all though the electronic voting experience was pretty pleasant.
February 28th, 2007 at 12:36
I did the electrovoting too. I thought it was well set up, although I always feel suspicious of it.
March 1st, 2007 at 11:28
My biggest problem with it right now is that secure voting relies on a well understood process and a lack of trust of everyone involved. The voting machine manufacturers for the the most part are saying that we should trust them, and the process has not caught up. We need to have random manual recounts on the paper trail to assure that everything came through ok. At least the issue of a voter verifiable paper trail is becoming pretty well known.