Don't any of you think there is something wrong with the 2006 Congressional voting using E-voting?

Question

I know that I am totally opposed to it. what problems do you see?

Answer 1

It all depends on who wins. The dems will scream and moan about how it can be cheated, tampered with etc. before the election, but then in the areas they win it will be called a fair election and the equipment will be said to have been working correctly. However, in areas they lose, it will be called a stolen election, the republicans tampered with the equipment etc. The only fair election is one that a democrat wins even if there isn't a democrat in the race.

Answer 2

Voting machines made by the lowest bidder, on the spur of the moment, without consideration of "elitist" things like experience and qualifications, without an smaller scale official test to debug...what could possibly go wrong?

Most people still believe the old black rock/white rock method of voting over hanging chad paper ballots. So of course electronic votes will always be more suspect than paper ballots, rationale or not. But the truth is a well planned changed to electronic voting would be no worse than paper ballots.

Paper ballots are lost, invalidated, misinterpreted, and forged all the time. Voting officials have been accused of changing ballots. Errored paper ballots can be big news like Florida or suppressed on the aspect that the vote wasn't close enough for the errored ballots to make a difference. People even pry open paper ballot boxes to stuff or slip in extra ballots if officials don't watch.

However it does seem various government efforts ignore certain basics. A key requirement is that voting machines themselves are never Internet or networked connected. Nor should the actual vote tallying machines be on the Internet (sneaker net connection for validated precint reports). They must also be reasonably secured against sabotage (special locked boxes & no way to plug in or type non-voting keys). PCs with normal keyboards are just trouble for most purposes.

I suspect the government will eventually just have a machine that issues you a one time use, private encryption key on your USB thumbdrive when you validate your identity to vote (precinct kiosk). Then you can use any Internet connected machine to vote (your responsibilty for on machine security). Voting would be on a private encrypted secured session and then deposit the finished digitally encrytped and signed ballot on several servers (say precinct and Republican and Democratic party servers). Thus there would multiple copies of your encrypted vote to compare if there were losses or irregularities. The "key-issues" are not losing the decryption keys to the votes (one for each voter) and making sure that voters are not associated with the key they were given while still makng sure the voter database reflects they were issued their one and only vote encryption key.

Answer 3

In 2001 the est. to switch over from paper to e-vote was $850,000,well it's 2006 and they were used for the first time in the primaries the price $10,000,000,they crash they broke down,the price is so high because the election officials were to old to maintain the equipment,what b.c.the company that is pulling this farce is called DIEBOLD,i,hope other states don't get rope in like we did,come November it's back to paper.

Answer 4

I see problems like people being able to hack into the computer systems to change the votes, or manipulation of the numbers from the administrators. I wouldn't trust a system like that. Then again after that mess in florida, I don't know if I trust the system as it is now.

Answer 5

I am totally opposed to it also, and for all the reasons everyone else is! What has America become if we can't have an honest election? A Plutocracy? A Dictatorship? You choose, and you lose anyway...

Answer 6

I worry that there will be ways for people to cheat or alter the voting.

Answer 7

Well, I once had to walk into the bank to tell them their die bold machine was stuck on a windows screen...and you know how much people love hacking windows....

Answer 8

This is dumb. ATM machines have been around a long time, do you think the technology is any different. How much have you lost to an ATM machine?

Answer 9

It's too easy to hack into the system and change votes. Princeton showed how easy it is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XpiQaczhVk&mode=related&search=

Answer 10

yes