Quite frankly, I’m shocked. I’m going to need to re-evaluate my cynicism to come to terms with last night’s election.
The vote also suggests that electronic voting systems did not adversely influence yesterday’s election, which isn’t to say that they worked well. In fact in quite a few precincts they were an unmitigated disaster. However I think it’s now clear that our vote was not compromised by the software in these systems directly. It’s still clear that they don’t work very well and to the extent that they are not universally deployed (and in that they don’t share the same failure modes) that the precincts in which they are deployed are potentially disadvantaged relative to precincts not using e-voting and that that’s a problem.
And while this may seem to be paranoid tin-foil hat territory, as Glenn Greenwald seem to be suggesting, as a software engineer it’s obvious to me that our election software must be secure and it’s not. No real change here, last night’s election notwithstanding. Broke is broke.
One of my life mantras goes something like: “never attribute to malice that which can otherwise be explained by blatant stupidity.†And at this point I’m ready to believe that the whole e-voting issue boils down to nothing more than corporate graft. Big fat rich contracts for electronic voting systems that we didn’t really need and which don’t work very well. After all, getting software right turns out to be a lot harder than most people think, software engineers especially included.
Nonetheless the current systems are woefully insecure and need to be fixed before the next election. And although there are arguments against paper balloting, on the whole we’d be much better off switching back to paper until we can get it together to design an electronic voting system that’s secure. We need to keep the pressure on. Because another of my life mantras is, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.â€
This is not a partisan issue. All sides should now unite in support of secure balloting. Let’s leave the politics to district gerrymandering. Ah, but I’m such an optimist today…
So it turns out we still have some remnant of functioning democracy left in the United States. I really wasn’t so sure, but I’m happy to eat my words. Very happy, actually. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison must have had quite a good time last night.
I wrote to my Congress critter today, the Honorable incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi from San Francisco, and I suggested the following priorities:
- restore Constitutional checks and balances
- restore civil liberties to pre-9/11 balance + 9/11 Commission recommendations
- fix electronic voting
- nuke K-street from orbit
So take a minute and write your Congress critter. Perhaps they’re actually listening today. You can find them here:
And for those of you not living in California, you might not hear much about it, the media still being the pathetic excuse for the media that it is, but the City of San Francisco voted to Impeach Bush and Cheney by 59.4% to 40.6%. Gotta love those San Francisco values…
