Tom Munnecke’s Eclectica

I voted today using the Diebold Electronic Voting system… my first time. It was a very user friendly and intuitive system… the official helping me was more of a nuisance than a help.

However, I am still VERY UNHAPPY with the state of electronic voting systems. This system is the equivalent of declaring a bank so trustworthy that you trust them with your money without any auditing or monthly statements. We are simply throwing our votes into a machine, assuming that they come out the other end in tact. We have no way of knowing if the manufacturer of the system came up with a scheme to defraud the voters, nor would the county registrar of voters. This is an incredible amount of trust to be vesting in a single corporate entity.

The bad guys don’t need to blow up buildings with airplanes. They just need to buy a controlling interest in Diebold and hijack our democracy – if they haven’t already.

We should be defending our vote counting process like we defend Fort Knox.

P.S. I have been designing information systems for 35 years now, and spent a good chunk of time working on a County vote counting system shortly out of college. These are not idle words.

This is a Really Serious situation.

An interesting idea I’ve been noodling on would be to do a Reality TV show on the subject of compassion or uplift.

For example, Mother Teresa was hospitalized in San Diego a few years back, and during her stay, she managed to convince her Jewish Cardiologist to volunteer at a clinic in Tijuana.

This could be done with humor, human interest, irony, and clever production so that it isn’t trying to hit people over the head with virtue…

Thought I’d blog this idea and see what emerges…