Given the recent troubles in local elections (a week ago I stood in line for half an hour before being told that my name couldn't be found in the voter lists, but when I came back that afternoon everything went swimmingly; thousands of others had similar experiences in Maryland) it seems likely to me that the electronic vote-tallying machines here are not crooked — since if they were fiendishly rigged, the same über-genius conspiracy would make the election process run über-smoothly, to avoid raising suspicions!

Of course, that's still no reason to accept voting systems that don't offer a paper audit trail, any more than one should trust an automated teller machine that refuses to issue a receipt ...

(cf. CryptoGram (23 Dec 2003), ...)

TopicSociety - TopicHumor - TopicPersonalHistory - 2006-09-19

(correlates: CryptoGram, CelebrityTakeover, WikiVoting, ...)