Voting With Your Electrons

By Sean Corbett in News on Oct 19, 2006 9:03PM

This November 7th many Chicagoans will again be casting their votes on new-fangled electronic voting machines. For the more tech-savvy Chicago politicians, electronic voting opens up an entirely new way to manipulate elections. Why go through the trouble of paying bums to vote as dead people when you could just change the way the machine counts. How about… three votes for me, one for you?

Extreme levels of vote manipulation are easily accomplished on the nation’s most popular voting machines, those produced by Diebold; luckily those are not the machines in use in Chicago. Our machines are manufactured by Sequoia voting systems and although they don’t have a scott free history we consider them to be the lesser of several evils. These same Sequoia systems and inadequate training of polling place workers did contribute to the major delays in vote tabulation this past spring during the primary elections. Voting glitches are expected again this November but at least we’re headed in the right direction with our venture into legitimate electronic voting.

The communities of armchair fair voting advocates are certainly larger and more vocal than the groups of people actually in the voting machine industry. There are numerous discussion groups online and professors researching various voting topics. Each group seams to have reached its own conclusion as to what changes are going to fix the system here in the US, the general prevailing logic is that our system is quite inadequate and that the people in charge don’t care enough to fix it. Chicagoist gives a big high-five to The City of Chicago for choosing the voting machine manufacturer who appears to be the least corrupt and the most interested in running legitimate, verifiable elections.