"The only time-worthy thing to do is to oppose them until open-source solutions are accepted."
Meh, I'm still unconvinced by the virtues of electronic voting at all, open source or otherwise. Little electronic currents simply have less mass than pencil marks on paper, and I mean that in a number of ways, including the fully literal one. A full accounting of cost/benefits shows the costs to be staggering once one accounts for the risks of tampering and the difficulty of preventing it, and the benefits mind-bogglingly tiny. (Heck, even if one merely accounts for the costs of materials the cost/benefit analysis isn't all that great.)
If it wasn't so darned shiny and high tech nobody would even consider electronic voting. It's just technofetishism run amok.
See, that's an example of what I mean. You simple take it as given that technology will simply solve the problem by virtue of being TECHNOLOGICAL, when a moment's thought starts poking huge gaping holes in logic.
Suppose Florida is a close race again in alt-2000 where electronic voting is widespread. But wait! In three precincts, close examination of the voting machines reveals that they have been systematically tampered with, in exactly the way described in this article, and the voting totals are unreliable. Aaaaaandd...
... now what? Count the ballots again? Can't. No such thing. Re-add the wrong numbers together for the wrong result? Hold the vote again in those precincts? That's fraught with its own serious problems. The vote is just screwed and there's basically nothing you can do about it.
"But the vote can be screwed with paper ballots too!" Yes, but it's much harder, leaves a much larger and harder to forge trail, requires vastly more effort, and is much easier to detect. (Ye olde "Benford's Law" trick will work only once, you know.) The question isn't whether computer voting "works", it's whether it's better.
And, secretly, I palmed a card. I tampered with those voting machines after the vote occurred. The vote numbers are totally accurate in my hypothetical scenario! But good luck proving that in real life.
One thing that people don't often get is that voting isn't about choosing a winner. Choosing winners is easy. It's about convincing the losers that they lost, and that the process is fair, and it's far better for them to participate in the Great Debate and sway people to their position and try to win the next election, rather than forming an armed mob and going on a rampage. Electronic voting machines make that outcome much harder. For once, Hollywood-hackability works on our side and the pervasive message that all computers are intrinsically infinitely hackable is not so far from the truth.
(... oh, and if you stay tuned for long enough, we'll be able to answer that "Now What?" question sooner or later, because it is only a matter of time before the body politic is literally faced with that question, instead of merely hypothetically.)
That electronic voting has problems doesn't in any way mean that paper voting didn't have problems. The statement "nobody would even consider electronic voting" is false. Plenty of people consider electronic voting because of the hanging chads, photos of people with magnifying glasses peering at ballots, etc.
Some evidence that you've actually read what you're replying to would be nice. I made your own point better than you did when I went into more detail on the problems with paper voting!
Meh, I'm still unconvinced by the virtues of electronic voting at all, open source or otherwise. Little electronic currents simply have less mass than pencil marks on paper, and I mean that in a number of ways, including the fully literal one. A full accounting of cost/benefits shows the costs to be staggering once one accounts for the risks of tampering and the difficulty of preventing it, and the benefits mind-bogglingly tiny. (Heck, even if one merely accounts for the costs of materials the cost/benefit analysis isn't all that great.)
If it wasn't so darned shiny and high tech nobody would even consider electronic voting. It's just technofetishism run amok.