Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Wot no audit trail

As the US elections get underway it seems there's trouble with the voting machines again. Frankly, it's a mystery to me how the richest democracy in the world continues to make a pig's ear of something as simple as voting in a first-past-the-post system.

Having personally observed the process of a national election vote count in the UK, I'd like to tell the administrators of the USAmerican polls how it can be done. You give every voter a piece of paper, and ask them to put a cross by the name of their preferred candidate. Then you count the bits of paper. And if there's any doubt you can count them again.

That's it.

Not exactly rocket science.

No hanging chads. No Heath Robinson contraptions. No machines that can be easily tampered with.

Of course, you may have to wait a few hours for the results. Woop-de-doo.

1 Comments:

At 10:19, Blogger Unknown said...

Bruce Schneier said it more elequently than I did. (commenting my own blog - hmmmm)

 

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