Reply #117: Hi, Patrick, I haven't seen you around.

[hunter]

But I haven't been hanging out much in the DU election forums lately. Even for purpose of arguing about election technology, it has become difficult for me to believe we live in any sort of Democracy or Republic. (I remember when it was still okay to laugh at elections in the Soviet Union... now I have very grave concerns about our own.)

It's a sad thing to live in a nation where people believe COUNTING MARKS ON A PIECE OF PAPER (1,2,3,4,5,6,7....) requires high technology.

If I went back to the nineteenth century and handed Herman Hollerith a bag of photodiodes, he could probably come up with an optical scanner that wwould be more trustworthy than some of the crap high-tech optical vote counters we have today.

As a practical matter paper ballots read by optical scanners are the only economical solution to our vote counting problems. But we must be very careful that these optical scanners don't have any more processing power than that required to simply count the votes. An optical scanner with mechanical counters might be preferable to something requiring an "operating system" or any proprietary software. (The suggestion that we might put such software in "escrow" is utterly appalling to me.)

The function of software is to manipulate data. There is no good reason to manipulate votes. The electronic path between your vote on your ballot and the count reported to the registrar needs to be entirely transparent. The optical scanners that read our votes have one job, and that is to simply count votes. These vote counting machines need to be as stupid and as low-tech as we can possibly make them or they will not be trustworthy.