OK. Can you please tell me why black-box voting systems are a good idea?

Putting aside the conspiracy theories as to the motives behind Diebold, and whether or not they “rigged” the election or whether they were “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes for the president next year,” can anyone still say that using a system that no one knows anything about is a good thing?

The only way to run an election with this type of machine is to allow anyone and everyone to see how they work, and to be able to handle the errors as they happen — not 2 years later when it’s too late to fix. There should be no secrets, because secrets let information like the fact that over 100,000 voting errors slip through the cracks. It’s a real shame that the systems failed, but requiring conspiracy theorists to find out about it is really terrible. I’m convinced that had people known what was going on when it did, there’d be alot more people outraged by this than there are now. As it is now, it’s just the tinfoil hat people and me — who some of you probably consider a tinfoil hat person.

I realize that paper ballots can be manipulated as well, but it takes a hell of a lot more effort and people involved to pull it off. With a black-box system, it really only takes one.

After all this complaining, I actually do have a solution for this problem: let the Amish run our elections in 2008.

Defined tags for this entry: black box voting, elections, politics, queries, rants