Why is e-voting so freakin’ hard?
This slashdot story tells of yet another e-voting system that has fallen on its face… this time in Finland… Yes, the land that Linus Torvalds called home can’t figure out how to add one to a number.
I wish someone would explain to me why e-voting is so freaking hard to implement. I mean we have computers doing all sorts of other things, like counting our money, controlling our ICBMs, landing the space shuttles, and delivering our porn… why can’t they simply tally a few simple selections?
Jiminy Christmas!
Here’s how you do it:
- Voter arrives at polling place
- Voter’s identity is verified by octogenarian polling-place volunteer
- Volunteer presses button on modified parking garage ticket machine
- Ticket machine dispenses a ticket which has a unique serialized number
- Volunteer gives ticket to Voter without associating the ticket to the voter on any documentation
- Voter goes to voting machine
- Voter inserts ticket into voting machine, which authenticates the voter’s unique opportunity to vote and logs the unique ID
- Voter votes
- Voting machine echoes back selections for verification
- Voting machine dispenses a paper receipt logging Voter’s selections and ticket number
- Voting machine also tallies selections and ticket number to internal paper record
- Voter keeps ticket and receipt
In the event of a recount, paper logs from voting machines are used. Failing that, voters who kept their receipts (civic duty, kids) can bring them back to be tallied.
Yet another patentable idea I turn over to you, the people.
I’ll tell you what… if people are having trouble writing computer programs that simply increment a number, maybe it’s time to start moving away from all these Integrated Development Environments and High-Level, Object Oriented programming languages, and just write the frickin’ thing in C or something. Deep down, it would look something like this:
#include<stdio.h>
main( )
{
int cand;
cand = cand++;
printf("Candidate Fred Foobar has %d votes",cand);
}
Obviously, you’d have to have structures in place to store the votes (of more than one candidate, no less), print the receipts and the logs and so on… but… you can get most of that stuff from “cookbooks” for your chosen language.
Damn it, people… the code’s already mostly written.