Sure, most of us have. We did after all support them with either our time or money or both. We put their bumperstickers in our car windows, maybe distributed literature on at shopping centers, went to rally's you all know the drill. Then came Election 2000. Everyone did all those things and we had election day. Then came Florida. Within hours, many millions of us with campaign literature in our backseats, candidate's buttons on our jackets and that naivete that your guy can still pull it out began to learn about chad, hanging (the Republican's favorite kind); pregnant; and every other permutation and combination of paper-unable-to-be-poked-through a simple hole by a voter. Then we were treated to the ruminations of the discernment of Voter Intent. I was waiting for the OJ Jury Consultants to show up...wait, I think I did see JoEllen Demetrius once. Then blazing punditry, pronouncements, and finally the pontification of the unelected wise men and women in the Supreme Court in the un-election of the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Wow, that was a long way to go to get to...

...Voting Machines

I have a confession to make, I'm a sort of high-tech, geeky kind of guy. Sure, I'm a macho former Naval Aviator (I look much more like Zorro's fat mustachioed sidekick, whatzizname, than Tom Cruise), I disdain rollercoasters as "kid stuff" and hell, I'll even handle poisonous snakes. But ladies and gentlemen, for all that, I prefer my voting on paper, with old-fashioned auditability and accountability built into the system. After having worked in the technology sector for the last decade and a half, and staying in the relatively un-sexy hardware and networking side, I have come to value techie-inventions that make my life easier. But I value the ones that I can look into and see what makes them tick, where it's broken and able to be fixed, far more than stuff that has no user or even techie transparency.

Voting Machines

So now the move to put paperless, touchscreen voting machines out there is riding a swift almost crushing wave. What's wrong? The machines are only made by one or two companies, they are non-serviceable by your local county/precinct/parish whatever voting officials, in fact said officials can't even hire tech support to take care of them on election day. The machines produce no paper or auditable record of how you voted, and once you leave the booth, there is no way to dispute whether the vote was even recorded correctly. The manufacturers are refusing to release the source code for independant audit, claiming (wrongly, I think in the public interest) Trade Secrecy, and such. No, I think if we buy this software, we do not just get the license, we should at least get the source code too, and the rights to modify it if need be by other independent developers who agree to make the changes/do the work for the good of the voters, not the companies. I am not suggesting Open Source VotingWare, but code that's reviewable by us, the buyer to keep everything honest. IssuesGuy, at Seeing the Forest has several links to this here. If this is not a big deal to you, then consider this, if the election could be turned as much on it's head as it was in 2000, think about an election where the voting machines are controlled exclusively by companies that donate heavily to a political party (in this case the Republican party), or have former company officials in the Congress (Sen Chuck Hagel R-Ne) for example.

There is nothing inherently either evil or wrong about the introduction of electronic voting to our electoral process. There is something very wrong a bout making the process as secretive and inaccessible as these companies wish to do. A secret ballot is one wonderful thing, a secret ballot counter is an all-together different thing.

They should not be allowed to have a vote in their own future, until we can see the votes in ours.