siriuskase's Journal: I voted...maybe

We in Georgia had our primary last Tuesday and I put that indecipherable plastic card into that mysterious atm with the windozy looking graphical user interface. Did I really vote? I'll never know. There was certainly nothing about the experience to make me feel that I had. Where was my vote? On the card? In the machine? There was no paper trail and no receipt, no visual indication that my vote had registered anywhere and was available for recount if desired. I had no ballot in my hand to look at and confirm the chads were neatly punched out so that daylight could be seen through all the correct holes. Worse of all, there wasn't the familiar big wooden box with the padlock and the slot for me to drop my ballot into when I was ready to make it final.

I will try to address only the psycological issues here. Goodness knows we've already heard plenty about the integrity of the Diebold Corp and the ineptitude of the elderly Georgia poll worders who had never turned on a computer before, especially one that gives no status messages while booting up. All the cheery news about Diebold and the poll workers is enough to make me psycologically uncomfortable before I even see the machine.

So now it's my turn. The nice man has a small selection of debit cards apread in front of him on a table, he grabs one seemingly at random and sends me off to the next available machine. When I'm done, I hand the seemingly unchanged card back to him and he lays it back on the table available for reuse. What is the purpose of the card? Is it just a key? Does it contain my vote and the votes of the people who used it before me? I hope not since it seems so unsecure there in front of him and even more unsecure during the interval when I had a little bit of time to be alone with it in the booth. I wonder what would have happened if I pocketed the card and gave him an expired credit card painted to resemble it? The fact that I didn't need to think very hard to come up with that question isn't reassuring even though the designers probably though of it, too. I'm sure if I thought about it I could come up with even more, but the fact that this insecure card triggers this line of thinking in the first place is undesirable. Making the voter feel comfortable without insisting that he trust so much from so many people just isn't wise.

This isn't done, I know the card probably didn't nned to be secure. Maybe, I should just have faith that there isn't anything vital on it, that's it's simply some sort of key. But, then there's the machine, which has the audacity to have the look and feel of the most insecure OS in popular use on the planet. I don't trust Microsoft enough to use it's products at home, why should I use it to vote? Why couldn't I use any application I'd like to create a packet of voting information conforming to some open standard? Does it really matter what kind of machine and software I use to create my electronic ballot? I buy stuff online all the time and do various secure interactions with my bank, broker, and insurance company routinely. Why must the state use such an unuaually different system? The more a product deviates from normal, the more likely it will have a problem that isn't well understood.

I'm still not done, but I think I should save and refill my cup.