{"id":39,"date":"2008-07-07T07:40:45","date_gmt":"2008-07-07T05:40:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ofcourseimright.com\/?p=39"},"modified":"2008-07-07T10:01:16","modified_gmt":"2008-07-07T08:01:16","slug":"voting-machines-thank-heavens-for-academia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/?p=39","title":{"rendered":"Voting Machines: Thank Heavens for Academia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-40\" title=\"vote\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ofcourseimright.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/07\/vote.jpg\" alt=\"vote button\" width=\"129\" height=\"128\" \/>Often times it is said that the purpose of academic research is to seek the truth, no matter where it leads.\u00a0 The purpose of industry representatives is often to obscure the truths they do not like.\u00a0 Such apparently was the case at a recent hearing of the Texas House of Representatives&#8217; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.house.state.tx.us\/committees\/240.htm\">Committee on Elections<\/a>.\u00a0 These are the guys who are nominally supposed to ensure that each citizen of Texas gets an opportunity to vote, and that his or her vote is counted.\u00a0 The committee provides oversight and legislation for electronic voting.<\/p>\n<p>How secure is your electronic vote, compared to a paper ballet?\u00a0 Can you have an electronic hanging chad?\u00a0 A group of researchers have spent a fair amount of time answering that very question.\u00a0 Drs Ed Felton &amp; Dan Wallach, as well as others, have looked at numerous different voting systems, and found all sorts of little <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.rice.edu\/~dwallach\/pub\/texas-house-elections25june08.pdf\">problems<\/a>.\u00a0 For instance, some voting machines are susceptible to virii, and if they get it they can give it to their peers.\u00a0 That&#8217;s not a problem, according to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.freedom-to-tinker.com\/?p=1304\">manufacturers&#8217;<\/a> spokesmen.\u00a0 But who are we to believe?\u00a0 An academician whose purpose is to advance the state of the art and find truths, or a spokesman, whose purpose is to obscure them?<\/p>\n<p>There are mistakes made in many, if not all elections and surveys.\u00a0 Here are just a few questions:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>What is an acceptable rate of error?\u00a0 As 2000 demonstrated, even a hand count of paper ballots can have problem.<\/li>\n<li>Rather than prevaricate, why shouldn&#8217;t the vendors of these voting machines fix the problems that have been reported?<\/li>\n<li>What sort of regulations are appropriate?\u00a0 The spokesmen all but demanded a common standard in as much as they complained that there was none.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Conveniently Dr. Wallach has an answer to that last question.\u00a0 His testimony recommends just that.<\/p>\n<p>For what it&#8217;s worth, as an expatriate I do not expect to use a voting machine for quite some time, but rather a paper ballot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Often times it is said that the purpose of academic research is to seek the truth, no matter where it leads.\u00a0 The purpose of industry representatives is often to obscure the truths they do not like.\u00a0 Such apparently was the case at a recent hearing of the Texas House of Representatives&#8217; Committee on Elections.\u00a0 These &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/?p=39\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Voting Machines: Thank Heavens for Academia&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,4,9],"tags":[49,493,496,48],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-expat-fun","category-politics","category-security","tag-lying","tag-politics","tag-security","tag-voting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}