E-Voting

"Do you like me?"
---> Yes
---> No

Even as grade-schoolers we all understood that if you wanted to know and record where someone stood on an issue, you wrote out all their options for them on a piece of paper, and let them mark which one they wished. Not so anymore. It would seem that some greedy manipulative pricks at some level of corruption have convinced somebody that we need computers to vote. COMPUTERS!!!! To fucking VOTE!!!

Let me tell you something about computers. There are so many layers of abstraction in a computer that you never know exactly what's going on. I write software at a fairly high level, in object-oriented compiled languages. Below that there is an API, operating system level, below that assembly, below that machine instructions (these are rough guidelines here, accuracy unimportant). The point is that at any of these levels there may exist a bug or perhaps even a malicious, intentional piece of code which alters the intended operation of what I wrote at the high-level language. Nevermind how easy it would be to slip a little gotcha into the program itself.

These things are not only possible to hack, they are easy to hack. There have been several demonstrations at several different universities and government offices around the country of some graduate student or programmer sitting down with the newest machine from some company's assembly line and hacking it within a couple of hours.

Just wait, this gets worse. Some of these machines don't even have paper trails. Are you KIDDING ME????? "Just trust us, guys. Our machines don't make mistakes. You don't need a paper trail." Combine this with all the reports of machines changing people's votes RIGHT BEFORE THEIR EYES and this is a pretty shady situation. Will someone explain to me what was wrong with paper ballots? Extremely simple, no usability issues. In fact it provided an extra check in the democratic process; if you're too stupid to put a check-mark on paper, you're obviously too stupid to vote.

One can't say the same thing for these computerized monstrosities. I shouldn't have to think about how to operate whatever voting device in front of me. I should have to think about what I'm voting for. These devices are entirely too complex for the task at hand. I don't know who made the decision to move to electronic voting. It must have been some greedy businessman or corrupt jackass politician, because any engineer will tell you that the simplest solution is nearly always the correct one. It doesn't get much simpler than pen and paper.