Voting Machines – Why?
Joel Spolsky posted a quickie about the NYTimes article today on the voting machines used in Cleveland. I live in Columbus, and we used Diebolds tooe. I didn’t bother to note the model number, or even if such things are displayed to the voter, but I found the interface confusing. There are a lot of elderly folks in my district and I’l bet their experience was worse than mine.
Of course, it doesn’t make me feel much better knowing that CE is under the hood.
Voting Machines – Elections – Ballots – Politics – New York Times:
IN THE LOBBY OF JANE PLATTEN’S OFFICE in Cleveland sits an AccuVote-TSX, made by Diebold. It is the machine that Cuyahoga County votes on, and it works like this: Inside each machine there is a computer roughly as powerful and flexible as a modern hand-held organizer. It runs Windows CE as its operating system, and Diebold has installed its own specialized voting software to run on top of Windows. When the voters tap the screen to indicate their choices, the computer records each choice on a flash-memory card that fits in a slot on the machine, much as a flash card stores pictures on your digital camera. At the end of the election night, these cards are taken to the county’s election headquarters and tallied by the GEMS server. In case a memory card is accidentally lost or destroyed, the computer also stores each vote on a different chip inside the machine; election officials can open the voting machine and remove the chip in an emergency.
[Clued in by: Joel on Software]
Now, my question is Why? Why do we have these things in the first place? Not, why don’t electronic voting machines work. Not, why don’t we use open source instead of vendor controlled systems (as the article points out painfully).
Why have them at all? What problem to do they solve?
Sure, there is the question of punch cards and butterflies (ala 2000), but really couldn’t that system just be improved? We vote just a few times a year. Is it critical that we know the outcome right when the polls close? Couldn’t we vote over several days (as they do in other countries) and then tally the votes over a similar period of time?
Why all the rush?
It’s not like politics move at such a lightning-quick pace to begin with. What’s a few days in-between? Besides, just think of all the ad revenue to be generated by dragging it out, the endless flow of news articles wondering about the outcome, the watercooler chatter…
Wait, do we even have watercoolers anymore?
Hmmm. Maybe it is more productive to get those results in quicker after all.
