Well I tried! Washington Cty., AR held their meeting tonight to decide

[sinkingfeeling]

on which ES & S tabulator and touch-screen machines to order. I was the only citizen to speak against the systems. I simply stated that I objected to having my ballot counted in secret by a private corporation, unwilling to share it's 'proprietary' source code for review. I told them that as a programmer for 35 years, I would never trust a machine to accurately record my vote. I can write code to display whatever I want on a screen, whatever I want printed on a piece of paper, and still count the vote anyway I so desired. I asked if anyone making the decision had read the 'under reported' GAO paper that clearly stated that these systems were open to hackers and manipulation.

The ES & S guy didn't like what I said. He said it was other competitive manufacturers that had the problems. He admitted that their code was proprietary and that was because, 'it's just the code that we developed.'

One local TV station requested an interview which they taped with me, but don't know if they'll actually show it or not. I told them that it was beyond me how people were willing to allow corporations with their own agendas to count our votes. How the past two elections didn't 'compute' and that I demanded the use of paper ballots, counted by hand !


Cross posted with the Election Reform Forum

[jsamuel]

1. Hey, I wasn't aware of this! Let me know and I will speak with you!!!

I am also a computer scientist (but am employed and am going to school right now for Archeology) and live in Washington Cty. I would love to talk to people about this.