Udo's Techblog

Yes, it's Election Night on Udo's Techblog - and like everybody else I'm already hooked on CNN even though they apparently have gotten rid of the exit polls and as of right now are just reporting meaningless filler on a 30-minute endless loop until this sucker is finally called in a few hours.

Anyway, the one thing they actually do report is what seems to be wide-spread election tampering across the board. Voting machines not recording votes, machines marking your vote as McCain regardless of what box you checked, and registered voters have apparently been removed from the list so they can't vote at all, and it looks like a load of people didn't get their absentee ballots. Couldn't this whole thing be handled over the net?

It seems fitting to me that CNN asked the same question just now, and the person they invited for this was some guy from Citrix - a company that made ridiculous sums of money by selling their VNC clone to companies on a large scale disguised as a groundbreaking innovation, condemning millions of users to slow, crappy and interrupted computing experiences. So tell us, Mr Citrix Guy, when can we expect to be able to cast our vote online? Well, the answer comes back as a stream of barely intelligible generalisms, and I'm paraphrasing this out of my ass into a language that makes more sense: not before the public sector spends a few billions on pilot studies conducted by my company, and even then there will be huge technical issues blah blah blah.

It astonishes me that we only get to hear from these people, instead of, say, guys and girls who actually implement the web as we use it everyday. Where is Google, Microsoft, Facebook? Anyone? Bueller..?

There is no question we'll get web voting some day in the future. And I can see now how it will work, based on the country you're in:

In the US: Votes will be cast using a Windows-only plugin. Only IP adresses from the continental US will be usable, screwing a lot of absentee voters, and you won't be able to vote from a Cogent line. 60% of all votes will automatically be recorded for the Republican candidate and there will be no way to tell whether your vote was counted at all. There will be three highly ambiguous checkboxes to cast your vote for either of two candidates.

In Germany: Voting will be done via a Java 1.2 client that has a download size of 780 megabytes and will only run on either a Windows version that won't come out until two years after the election or some ancient Debian release from the dawn of time. Months before you can even log in, you'll need to complete a registration process that requires you to provide 5 different types of legal identification and the filling-out of 12 paper forms at 3 different governmental offices spaced equally all over town. You will also have to buy a biometric scanner from Siemens for 250 Euros that can only be connected to your computer by a Telex line.

What will electronic voting be like in your country?