Tomorrow there will be a hearing concerning the use of voting machines during the election of the current german parliament back in 2005. Two citicens believe the used machines, Nedap ESD 1 and ESD 2, are not compliant with the german constitution.
The Chaos Computer Club provides a page about voting machines, and even observed the last local elections in Brandenburg 2008.
Unlike the CCC, I do not believe that electronic voting is a bad thing per se. The question however is how we can design the whole process so it provides the necessary transparency.
Hmm. I would rephrase the last statement a little bit:
“The question however is IF we can design the whole process so it provides the necessary transparency.”
I’m rather pessimistic.
BTW, does your blog support Trackback?
At least it was possible (though it sounds rather archaic) that the voting machine prints a ballot which gets archieved. So the voter can control his voting was recorded correctly, and it is possible the control the result of an election afterwards.
During the hearing, the claimant was asked if he believes that the constitution requires that the voting has to materialize somehow (e.g. a paper ballot). He was clever enough to deny. The future might bring us technologies to archieve the votes electronically. Even though we cannot imagine such a system yet.
Concerning pings and trackbacks, they are enabled. WordPress should also automatically ping other blogs as soon I link/cite them. But something does not seem to work: I never saw me appearing in the comments of cited posts. Needs some further investigation.