Avi Rubin's Day As An Election Judge

from the learning-from-the-inside dept

Yesterday we wrote about the electronic voting going on during Super Tuesday primaries - and mentioned that e-voting critic Avi Rubin was working as an election judge. After spending all day doing so, he wrote up a fascinating account of the experience, which was apparently made much more difficult by the publicity surrounding the fact that he was an election judge. He said it helped clarify some things for him - including some security risks that he believed are minimized by vigilant election judges, and others that are still wide open. More importantly, though, he saw just how little most people understand the issue being debated. Instead of distrusting the machines, they seemed to distrust him. This is a typical response of blaming the messenger. The other thing (which shouldn't really be that surprising) is that most voters really liked the machines and weren't concerned about the security at all. Of course, electronic voting supporters will claim that this means everything was great - which is missing the point. We'd all like for people to have electronic voting machines they like if they can shown to have a verifiable way of backing up the votes they are counting. It's not about being against electronic voting. It's about problems with the machines as they are currently implemented.

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