Electronic Voting...

Yesterday at the local mall, they had early voting. However, it was electronic only. There's no other option whatsoever. This particular system is setup by HART, which a friend of mine works in sales. The system they had was the eSlate. While it might seem to be the most solid of the e-voting solutions, it still doesn't float my boat and I refuse to use any kind of electronic voting.

Why do I refuse? There have been many issues as of recent times, even through the prior election. There were miscounts, glitches, downtime, unauthorized personelle tending to the machines with the sensitive data on them, and most of all... there is no entity that audits or certifies these machines are up to security spec. While California has a certification process, the dishonorable Diebold continues to baffle everyone as to why they are still in the game of evoting, especially when they are charging out the yin-yang to include paper trails of your votes.

The alternatives:
- vote absentee
- don't vote at all
- or just do the e-vote and you'll see how much your vote doesn't really count

I have no trust in the system as it is. No matter how secure one system might think they are, this is just not the time to do it. ESPECIALLY, when these systems are running Windows, and they only security measures they have for the most part, is a simple NT/2000/XP authentication measure. That's it! The rest... Microsoft Access - at least that's Diebold's half-ass solution to make a buck.

What are you going to do?