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Instant democracy is getting closer. In 2011, Estonians will be able to elect their representatives using mobile phones. How would it work and, more importantly, will it actually work?
It's amazing that you can fall asleep with the polls showing one thing and wake up to a world you don't even recognise. Despite who I may have supported as of November 4th, as a fervent supporter of both democracy and touchscreen technology, I accept DRE 700:259 as the 44th President of the United States. But I'm totally using a paper ballet in 2012. [The Onion Thanks Mr. Ponies!]
Well, the election is over! Luckily, it was pretty clear from about two hours in who would be the winner this time around , so even if there were a couple of iffy voting hijinks, it wouldn't be anything to take up to the Supreme Court. Still, some post-election voting humour never hurt anybody - check out this Rube Goldberg machine by some kids over at the University of California Berkeley and feel relieved that, unlike in 2000, it's easy this year to laugh about this kind of stuff. [Thanks Roland!]
When I went to vote this afternoon, I was kind of disappointed to find that my location was using paper ballots. Not that I have anything against that really—other than the waste of paper it is actually pretty hard to screw up as a voter (although, once my ballot was scanned I suppose anything can happen). I guess the gadget dork in me was just hoping for a touchscreen model—despite the potential reliability issues. So, I have a two part question for you: Which voting method would you prefer? Which did you actually use?
Astronauts Michael Fincke and Gregory Chamitoff did what only four other Astronauts have done in NASA's 50 years when they voted today—from space. Thanks to a Texas bill passed in 1997, NASA space cases are able to legally vote while they're out of the planet on business. But how did they cast their ballot from space, you ask? Here's the answer that Space.com got.
Voting is great and everything, but wouldn't it be awesome if you could make your vote count more than once? Or, even better, change other people's votes to be for your candidate of choice? Well, good news, America! Now that we're using poorly-designed and insecure electronic voting machines, you can do just that with some simple hacking! And thanks to some researchers at Princeton, anyone can be a voting machine hacker. Here, we'll show you how!
Need more evidence that Democrats are more grassroots tech savvy than their elephantine counterparts? At a Sarah Palin rally in LA on Saturday, the California Democratic party rented a digital billboard across the street which displayed questions for the veep candiate sent by text message. Granted, even if Palin did read them, she wouldn't be able to recall which ones she read specifically. But still, quite awesome—I hope both parties get creative with tech like this, it's a fantastic way to reach voters. [CA Dems via Online Video Watch via Textually]
After the Florida debacle a number of years ago, it really shouldn't come as a surprise that there are *gasp* vulnerabilities in the voting system. Take this hack of the Sequoia Voting kiosk for example. As you will see in the video, a trojan app can be easily installed via a USB key planted among a pool of keys used to initialise the system. While it is highly unlikely that a hack like this could be implemented in such a way that it has a major impact on an election, it is a frightening prospect nonetheless. [CrunchGear]
The maker of the evil, wonky voting machines in Ohio that are going to be used for the election despite the fact they're broken has admitted that the machines do in fact lose votes (before, Premier, aka Diebold, said it was "user error"). It gets better! They can't be fixed before election day. Hey, it's not like anyone asked for your opinion anyway. Okay maybe they did, but that's beside the point, I think. [Columbus Dispatch via Slashdot]
Microsoft's just inexplicably joined up with Rock the Vote to allow Xbox Live gamers to register to vote, talk about the candidates and participate in preliminary presidential votes. It's unclear whether you can do all this from your Xbox 360 (our guess is no), but you should ask yourself this question: do you actually want the people you play with on Xbox Live to be one step closer to voting? So we can get four years of President Dick Hertz (VP candidate: Schweaty Balls)? [Image Credit - Niklas Hellerstedt]
