interesting articles.

http://www.nationalledger.com/artman/publish/article_27261950.shtml

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Diebold_insider__alleges_company_plagued_1206.html

The second one... I admit, I haven't read it yet, but it's an expose on Diebold and their voting machines.

I don't understand the way electronic voting machines are being handled in our country. President Bush, after his election, the first one, promised that there would be no more, alleged voting scandals. We would have clean elections, Katherine Harris would update everything so Florida wasn't the laughing stock of the nation, etc.

What happened though? I'm sure the article offers insight into it. Katherine Harris hasn't done anything, well other than help Bush get elected. Florida hasn't updated anything, in my county, Duval, we can't even provide enough voting stations in our downtown area.

If we truly truly wanted to fix the voting in our country, and we were dead set on making it electronic we could have done it, we can still do it. We have the most brilliant computer scientists at our top universities, who I'm positive, wouldn't mind working on a project like this. So here's my list of how to fix elections to make them clean.

1. Electronic voting machine software is completely open source. this allows academics to look at it, hackers on the internet to look at it, and your armchair computer scientist to look at it and assess vulnerabilities, code weakness and tampering. Why shouldn't the code be open to inspection? The secrecy makes no sense, how can we expect to trust the government if they are so secretive?

2. Ask nation's top computer scientists to pitch in, provide a grant for their time.

3. Paper trail.

What's so difficult about this? You'd think after all of the software malfunctions and machine failures, we'd think, ding ding ding, what we've got doesn't work. That is of course, if the powers that be actually want the voting process to be fair and accurate.