Electronic Voting And What Should Be Done

5 Pages 1125 Words

There’s been a lot of talk about this new computer system that casts election votes. Ideally, using electronic equipment has many advantages but there are disadvantages hiding in the cave ready to attack. We’ve all seen electronic equipment often work as expected but more importantly, it’s not uncommon for electronic equipment to fail and when this sort of concept is applied to voting, miscounting is simply unacceptable. I think the best way to solve this type problem is to try to make the voting machines work without fail but to never assume it won’t fail. As we’ve seen from the arrogance of the engineers of the Titanic or from the 2004 New York Yankees, just because it looks and sounds workable, we should never assume these machines will do what it should. By this, I don’t mean the system should fail completely but we should design the system to constantly self-check itself to insure no errors have been made. In addition, the system should friendly so that at least at the user point-of-view, there should not be problems with confusion or misinterpretation. Overall, making an e-voting system work requires the engineer to consider the logical, defensive (security against hacking) and personal standpoint of design and do so in a sensitive, introspective manner.
First and foremost, the system should be ethical. What this means is the system should be created to an acceptable and mainstream protocol. Ethics means different things to different people but we can’t satisfy all of these morals that people have all on one system since some might contradict one another so we need to decide on what the majority would find acceptable. Right off the bat, it’s important to prevent hacker attacks because people want a fair election and not a tailored one. We go to vote to voice our opinion and not that of someone else. Secondly, it’s important to let the public know what these voting machines do and how they’re secure...