Posted by Fitz
I work in a technology field. I have a cell phone. I have even been known to score a baseball game on a PDA. So it surprises people when I am seemingly anti-technology. What they do not understand is that I view technology as simply a tool. And, like any tool, its suitability and usefulness depends both on how it is used and the surrounding circumstances.
I do have some technology pet peeves, for example, I despise high tech solutions to low tech problems. I also resent poorly designed products. So it just figures that our office building has replaced the venerable flush valves in our bathrooms with, unquestionably, the worst performing automatic sensors and electronically controlled valves ever built. When you know someone is heading to the restroom because they borrow the IR remote from the TV in the conference room so they can force a stool to flush, you are not living a better life through science…
But, my long standing problems with electronic voting initiatives are based more on human nature. For example, if it is possible to lie, cheat, or steal, some people will. The honor system does work for most of us, but even in a small sampling of human beings, there is almost inevitably one who stiffs the coffee pool for a lousy quarter.
From this simple fact, we can actually extrapolate another well substantiated theorem. Government contractors produce crappy technology most of the time. Those of you, who may be engineers at Raytheon or some other huge contractor, please do not send me (well, the Carpetbagger) hate mail. I am not saying that government contractors hire bad engineers; I am saying that politics, coupled with convoluted checks and balances to fight corruption, consistently creates an environement where it is extremely difficult to produce quality systems. When you consider that the systems are then often operated by dysfunctional organizations, it is little wonder that it takes years to combine terrorist watch lists, and decades for the FAA to deploy TIS and S-mode radar/transponder technology (I picked the last example because not only is the project 20 years late, no one at the FAA is even sure exactly how many installations have been deployed).
My point is that reports in security breaches of electronic voting systems are not flukes. I also think that stories like this one, which discusses the loss of electronic voting records in Florida, should concern all of us. Consider how the data loss was even discovered:
The malfunction was made public after the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, a citizen’s group, requested all data from the 2002 gubernatorial primary between Democratic candidates Janet Reno and Bill McBride.
Although the rocket scientists in Florida have conceded that data was lost both in May and November:
In December, officials began backing up the data daily, to help avoid similar data wipeouts in the future, said Seth Kaplan, spokesman for the county’s elections supervisor, Constance Kaplan.
I would contend that the fact that data integrity and redundancy was not considered until seven months after the first loss (as opposed to part of the original system design) is a pretty good case for my second theorem. Although I have not checked, the fact that both spokesman and supervisor share the same last name may be a good case for my first one.