OT: Re: Voting Project Needs Python People

[Paul Rubin]

"Andrew Dalke" <adalke at mindspring.com> writes:
> At present there are 50 people who paid the non-refundable fee
> for running for the California governship.  The article I just read
> said the standard ballot used could handle up to 300 entires.

Yikes.  The weirdest thing about that election is that it's likely to
give the governorship to whoever finishes in SECOND place (if you count
"no recall" as a vote for the incumbent governor).

Btw, Defcon is this weekend (or pretty soon) and I want to float the
idea of "black hat voting" (to go with "black box voting").  Black hat
voting works like this: 

  1) Announce that Defcon members will elect this year's Evil Overlord
     of the Black Hat Universe

  2) Further announce that the votes will be counted with Diebold machines.
     (Of course the organizers would have to get those from somewhere)

  3) See what happens.  In this election, whoever does the best job of
     cheating -deserves- to win.

It would be interesting to see how the Python-based voting machines do
in a situation like that.