Sunday, November 28, 2004
NY Times gets it right on evoting reliability
Battling columnists: James Fallows of the New York Times responds to the trust the machines article.
New York Times - November 28, 2004
Electronic Voting 1.0, and No Time to Upgrade
via Slashdot Buggy Voting Machines /.
A columnist in The Washington Post recently suggested that nostalgia for paper ballots, in today's reliably computerized world, must reflect a Luddite disdain for technology in general or an Oliver Stone-style paranoia about the schemings of the political world.
Not at all. It can also arise from a clear understanding of how computers work - and don't. The more you know about the operations of today's widely trusted commercial computer networks, the more concerned you become about most electronic-voting systems.
The phenomenal reliability of the systems we trust for banking, communication, and everything else rests on two bedrock principles. One is the universal understanding in the technology world that nothing works right the first time, and maybe not the first 50 times.
New York Times - November 28, 2004
Electronic Voting 1.0, and No Time to Upgrade
via Slashdot Buggy Voting Machines /.
[permanent link] posted by rakerman : 9:21 pm
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