Thursday, December 1, 2005

Verified Voting is Cool

Look, I'm all about the technology. I'm a web developer by trade, and a computer nerd by hobby. I'd say by birth, but I was born in 1968, and I'm not sure if full-fledged computer nerddom had evolved yet back then. I love all things having to do with technology, from my TiVo to my iPod to my Playstation, Playstation 2, and my XBox. Heck, I love my cell phone. What don't I love? Paperless voting machines.

Yes, having electronic voting machines is cool. Having no way to verify your vote is not. Let's say that some sort of catastrophic weather event like a hurricane, or tornado or blizzard wiped out a whole bunch of paper votes beyond reading. In that case it would be darned handy to have all of those votes also stored on a handy, not-wiped-out database. It just goes to follow that in the case of data loss, or power outage, or hack job that there should also be paper records of the votes. We should have a backup to our system, just out of common sense, and we should be able to verify that the votes were recorded correctly.

There's a website showing which states have already made verified voting a law, which ones have them proposed, and which haven't taken any action yet. It's a good resource for reading material about this subject, with press/media links and a page helping people to take action. It's called Verified Voting.Org and it's worth reading.

And, of course, you should still go over to Rush Holt's site, if you haven't yet, and sign his petition about HR 550.

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