eVoting
Florida Bans Electronic Voting Machines
Oh, Florida, how we love to make you a punchline.
Florida has abruptly reversed course after the debacle of the 2006 election and banned electronic voting devices from all state elections. Florida was at the forefront of the electronic voting revolution after the disaster that was 2000 where Russia considered Florida a backwards democracy. However, since 2000 the machines themselves have been under scrutiny as being easily hackable, prone to error, and of questionable quality.
Florida is spending $26 million to replace the electronic machines with the optical scan type. Electronic machines will still be available for handicapped individuals as a result of Federal law mandating their use in elections. The eVoting machines cost Pinellas County alone $14 million in 2001 and there are a total of 15 counties in Florida using these machines. All of them will be scrapped (hopefully not to hackers) and replaced.
I’ve long been opposed to electronic voting machines that give no auditable trail of the votes cast (whether paper or otherwise). The fact that a company with such a partisan CEO (Diebold’s CEO promised to deliver Ohio to Bush in 2004) refuses to make an auditable paper trail and even updates the machines without telling the state gives me a chill.
Once again, in Canada you get a piece of paper and mark an X with a pencil. How freaking hard do we have to make voting?
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Discussion
6 comments for “Florida Bans Electronic Voting Machines”
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What about the simple fact that only allowing disabled people to use electronic voting machines will still garner enough votes to hack a close election? Maybe they need to enact the ability to create a paper trail for those votes as well.
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Of course electronci voting machines are something of a red herring. The real danger is in how the votes are COUNTED, not how they are CAST. Optical scan solutions still tend to be hooked up to highly insecure black-box vote tabulation servers built by Republicans, but at least there are paper ballots than can be recounted by human beings.
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maybe they can sell them on to zimbabwe. i am sure robert mugabe would really welcome them!
[...] small step: Florida has abruptly reversed course after the debacle of the 2006 election and banned electronic vo… Florida was at the forefront of the electronic voting revolution after the disaster that was 2000 [...]