by Alec Muffett
I notice that today’s Iraqi election was conducted with pencil and paper.
No Diebold machines in evidence, from what I saw on the news.
I wonder why that might be?
Perhaps they feel the populace wouldn’t consider voting machines to be consistent with a credible election?
Easy: they don’t have any. Looks like Diebold missed the opportunity to persuade US administration on the need to provide fair voting machines.
In fact, most of countries on Middle East and in general on east side of Europe are still using regular means to count votes, it is not that easy to deploy e-voting there. Russia, for example only started to use kind of e-voting system last year or two. Even there bulletins are paper-based and scanned later during counting procedure.
The irony in this was that the UK still uses paper voting, and aside from a brief flurry of interest in “online voting” several years back, i can’t recall anyone trying to change it.
We still have arguments about jerrymandering, and the effect of people *mailing* their votes in, but at least there is an audit trail…
ps: Hi Alex, nice to hear from you. 😎
Diebold cash machines (ATMs) have started appearing down here.. 🙁
Chris
I don’t know how far will it go in, say, Russia, though e-voting ideas keeps me a bit wiry — it is definitely not ‘the answer’ to problems of regular tampering with voting as worldwide experience showed. In Nigeria Russian company Biolink keeps a persona identification via biometrics, because lack of passports for majority of population forbids you to identify them in a regular way.
I wonder if we could map e-voting attempts to software protection/cracking history — no matter how far can you advance your program protection, it will be cracked and used ‘unlawfully’. Perhaps, better voting system is needed — it is definitely not a technology-only issue.
Do they allow you to take bribes for your vote while you access your bank account?
That seems to not have been implemented on the Diebold cash machines here… though I think I voted for the GOP when I checked my account balance, earlier today.
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