The Zoo over Ambuscade Street

Irony is... Some of the comments are well worth reading as well.

[EDIT] "Maybe the MPAA should rate this thing NC-17 for explicit religion." *sniirk*

You know that sense of impending doom akin to staring into the headlights of a fast-approaching train? Yea, work's like that today. Things are going to be miserable until about Mayish, and then downright unpleasant from around the end of May until, say, August. After that things are going to get...progressively less pretty, especially around September. At least they pay me well. And I'd damn well be getting a raise and a bonus come September. Especially as I keep pointing out Really Important Things that nobody else has bothered to notice, which inevitably generates more work for me. Ah well.

They fail to record absentee ballots correctly, to the tune of almost seven thousand votes going uncounted.

Yet so many politicians pushed so hard to get these deployed for the 2004 elections. And so many vendors of said machines insist that a paper trail is not necessary, when that is the only way this error was caught. Note that these were just the absentee votes, and that there is no real way of checking the accuracy or validity of the votes that were cast on-site.

I want to trust the results of our elections, but with electronic voting machines being so widely deployed I don't know that I have the confidence to. Whoever wins the election this November is likely going to have a spectre of doubt hanging over him, which undermines our entire electoral system. Just look at the mess that was our last Presidential election, and the number of people who believe that Bush is not our elected President. And that was with the old, reliable, and well understood punchcard machines.

Anyone who's done any kind of work with computer security (or heck, even a computer! How far do you trust Windows to work correctly every time?) knows that you cannot trust your computer. The only truly secure computer is the one that's been unplugged, encased in concrete, and dropped in the closest river. How long does it take you programming types to get a newly written program working perfectly? How well do you test it? Do you test every path, every statement sequence? How much longer does it take to debug a 1000 line program than it does for a 100 line program?

Despite this, our government and our corporations want to deploy poorly tested machines that have been conclusively proven to not work in the necessary manner, that have been conclusively proven to be poorly programmed and easily hacked.

[EDIT] And notice that the flaw was caught by chance, pure and simple. What if none of the ten ballots they randomly checked had this problem?

[/tin-foil hat rant]