OT: US election

[John Roth]

"Boris Borcic" <borcis at geneva-link.ch> wrote in message
news:3CB08659.F3ED147 at geneva-link.ch...
> Andrew Dalke wrote:
> >
> > Just as an off-topic reminder.  The difference between Bush and
> > Gore was less than 2,000.  Given the final Florida results of
> >     Bush    2,909,176, Republican
> >     Gore    2,907,451, Democrat
> >     Nader      96,837, Green
> >     Browne     18,856, Libertarian
> >     Buchanan   17,356, Reform
> >     Phillips    4,280, Official Constitution Party
> >     Hagelin     2,287, Natural Law
>
> BTW, I've been wondering if all the problems with voting machines
> (if not Bush's election itself) should not be ascribed to the infamous
> Y2K bug : after all, if programmers had not been monopolized by the
> task of preventing the bug hitting, maybe some work force would have
> been applied to design and implement more modern voting machines.
>
> Boris Borcic

No. US elections are dominated by an attitude of how many
votes a party can steal while still claiming they are honest. There
has been a great deal of discussion of alternative voting methods
over here, and the issues are not programming related. On one side,
they come down to money (which is always in chronically short
supply,) and on the other they come down to protecting the
integrity of the voting process. The technologically snazziest
solutions (touch screen computers) are three times as expensive
as the next technology, and don't do a very good job of protecting
the integrity of the individual ballot, while also protecting the
anonymity of the individual voter.

The money issue is up front investment versus running costs.
Touch screen is much more expensive up front, but it has
much lower per-election costs: all those separate ballots
don't have to be printed.

John Roth