opinions-political-evote

here's a nytimes article on electronic voting:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/15/technology/circuits/15vote.html

From my experience with computers, I agree 100% with David Dill. I don't trust a computer with my vote if it has proprietary software that cannot be monitored. How would we even know if something is wrong? For all we know, elections in electronic voting districts are already being forged. Officials seem to be relying on the companies providing the systems to certify if there are any bugs or security bugs, which is not realistic. There are usually bugs and almost always real security flaws in computers, and history has shown that computer producers' interests do not always lie in telling the public about these. If our national elections start being counted mostly by unmonitored voting machines, I think we may as well consider all of the results tainted and hypothesize that every result is illegitimate. It's only a matter of time before a powerful group finds and exploits the security flaws in these machines.

-- bayle

note the large number of computer science phDs who agree that unverifiable electronic voting is asking to be corrupted:

http://verify.stanford.edu/EVOTE/technologists.html

(these people are endorsing the resolution on this page: http://verify.stanford.edu/EVOTE/statement.html)