aborchers's Journal: Latest letter to Rep. Wexler, re: Palm Beach voting machines

To the Honorable Robert Wexler:

I am writing today to thank you for pressuring Palm Beach County to implement printers for the voting machines, and to congratulate your success in this effort.

There is nothing more precious to our way of life than fair, honest, and open elections, and relying on proprietary voting systems without methods for auditing and accountability is simply not acceptable. As a computer scientist, I dismayed at the headlong rush to purchase touch screen equipment with nothing but the assurances of the vendors that they were reliable, assurances that have been belied already by experiences in other states with compromised networks, lack of adequate encryption, and other major security flaws. The addition of a paper trail to these systems will provide a trustworthy fallback in the event of questionable results, provide for recounts stipulated by Florida's election law, and do much to alleviate the suspicion with which many people rightly view this technology.

I would recommend going a step further, and requiring that all election systems operate on open-source software that can be examined and validated by the public. Given that the device hardware is the actual commodity of value and that robust voting software could be written by a CS graduate student, there is little merit in vendor claims of trade secret or other arguments against responsible peer review of the systems.

Again, thank you for your diligent work in this area. I will go to the polls this November with increased confidence that my vote will be correctly counted.

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Editorial note to /. readers:

To those of you who follow my correspondence campaign, don't fret. The next letter in the works is a FUD-dispersing missive on the recent SCO Congressional diatribe...

letter

[sanctimonius hypocrt]

The follow-up thank you note was a great idea, and one I`ve overlooked myself.