Talk:Lecture 3

It just so happened that I read the article from the Nation against e-voting (or at least e-voting in its present form) before I read the more reasoned papers against it.

Wow! Had the Nation bothered putting the facts about what was wrong with the system up front and cut out all the partisan Democrat stuff, they would've convinced me there was a problem. It's too bad they have an ax to grind with the Republicans - going off on on rants about evil corporations, Florida 2000, some wild speculation (with no proof of course) about how Max Cleland got cheated out of the US Senate election, etc... They've got their leftwing base even more riled up than it already is without adding that much insight.

Maybe Republicans are uniformly boneheads on this issue. Maybe they're not. Still, it would've been better had the Nation first convinced me that evoting systems as they are today are boneheaded. They made what I consider a feeble effort at this (at least compared to the balanced critiques) in the middle of their article (after bashing Bush&Co) and failed.

I'm not liberal bashing here either. Had a right-wing demagogue like Ann Coulter written against evoting, it would go something like: crooked 19th Dem party boss cheated in elections and Bill Clinton is a scumbag. Therefore, ALL Dems are scumbags and evoting is the latest liberal ploy to cheat elections. (OK, in the spirit of Ann I'm stretching a bit, but you get my drift.)

I'm pretty conservative, though I'm no Republican partisan. I'm wondering if other students were turned off - at least at an intellectual level - at how the Nation organized and presented their argument. In particular I wonder how it breaks down across idealogical affiliations. So maybe I'm just more partisan than I think :(. Or maybe you scum bag party boss liberals are the ones who are partisan :).

[John Spaith]

Pre-class poll: would you trust a paperless e-voting system?

TedZ: I'm curious about this. So before the class on Thursday, please chime in on "would you trust a paperless, non-verifiable, non-recountable e-voting system" as described in the reading material. I think everyone in the class has a pretty good computer science background, so this should be interesting. For the record: I wouldn't trust one as far as I could throw it (the machine itself). I guess that's what you get for being a Republican computer programmer. As a follow on question: given your knowledge and a bit of time, do you think that you could program a voting machine to undetectably alter vote counts?