[IP] more on Who's afraid of digital voting? Jim Lucier points to John Fund article...
Begin forwarded message:
From: "R. Stockton Gaines" <gaines@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: July 30, 2004 9:34:23 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] Who's afraid of digital voting? Jim Lucier points to
John Fund article...
I am a bit surprised that anyone would refer to the blatantly
propagandistic piece by Fund as "outstanding", but then I realized that
most of the ultra right believes that propaganda is a valid form of
argument. Fund's piece, aside from trying to paint those who might
want a certifiable elections with epithets such as "nuts", misses the
point. Electronic voting machines will have less errors than
non-electronic means of collecting votes. But the ability to have a
recount, or a certification that is other than "trust me", requires
some sort of physical record. Diebold skipped this part, and their
machines should not be accepted. Since bad vote counting worked so
well for his side last time, I can understand why he would be against
verifiable voting in the coming presidential election. No one should
believe that Fund has any real interest in how best to conduct an
election; as clearly and repeatedly as the point has been made that
verifiability is an essential point of a believable election, he
entirely ignores it.
James Lucier, who forwarded Fund's OpEd piece, wrote "For a long time I
have wondered how anyone who believes that properly constructed,
authenticated, and encrypted paperless transactions can be safer and
more secure than paper based transactions by any reasonable standard
can buy into the theory that digital balloting can never work unless it
achieves some impossible degree of perfection." For your information,
James, most of us who have been directly involved in computer security
believe the opposite: paper systems are more secure, if managed
correctly. An electronic system with a paper record that the voter can
verify, and others can later reverify, will achieve the best in both
accuracy and security.
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