Wanted: Playground justice
13th Nov 2006, 19:53 GMT
Not every geek kid deserves to get the snot kicked out of him on the playground. Every so often, though, a kid who's got more brains than sense finds himself on the receiving end of some ad hoc social training from a group of his or her peers, whether through mockery, ostracization or something more. And if the American electronic voting scene were a playground, by all rights a group of angry "kids" would right about now be gathering around Sequoia, Diebold and other makers of of vote-flipping machines. You see, despite Todd Weiss's fine article on whether vote-flipping is a machine problem or a human-error problem, the fact is that either way it's a machine problem. The Constitution doesn't say anything about the right to vote depending on whether a person can operate a piece of computer gear. The right to vote supercedes the right of these firms to slap together any old interface they please. E-voting manufacturers are permanently disallowed from Shark Tank-type stupid-user-tricks complaining, because they aren't allowed to complain: Their job is to suck it up, get it right, and humbly say thank you for being allowed a role in American democracy. It's a scandal that they didn't sufficiently test these machines to ensure that there wouldn't be problems, and shameful for them to act as if they weren't aware that the machine's users might be less than savvy.
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