Verified Voting

Joe from the EFF writes "Verified Voting has just gone live with a number of tools for all you data-hungry election nerds out there. Amongst the goods: an election guide for geeks, a voter's guide to electronic voting, the Verifier database of county-by-county election information and the Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS) which will be used on E-day by attorneys and observers in the field to collect data about election incidents called into the Election Protection Coalition's hotline, 1-866-OUR-VOTE. The geek community is playing a particularly active role in this year's eleciton via VV's TechWatch program. However, we could still use the help of the slashdot community, and all you have to do is click: We need to test the resiliency of the Verifier database and the EIRS before the election.

hold on a second.

[deathazre]

did we just get someone who ASKED for their site to be slashdotted?

Election Guide for Geeks

[artemis67]

Uhhh... we vote for faster servers and more memory in 2004!

Re:hold on a second.

[TykeClone]

Looks like they've received what they asked for.

Zort, Ptttzt....

[nweaver]

Slashdot 1, MySQL Server 0

Re:Well...

[aelbric]

So can we start adding little kill Icons to the /. menu bar for everytime we kill a server? Make it specific to the OS of the box that was flamed. Like fighter pilots used to do on the sides of their fighters.

You know, clippy, tux, a fedora, Darl.

Re:Well...

[halligas]

It may save time and screen real estate to put icons for servers that survived a /.ing

Re:hold on a second.

[cananian]

(I'm the lead programmer on the system.)
I actually explicitly asked that that last sentence be taken out. =(

Oh, well.

Man, I'm beginning to feel so old.

[jbarr]

Not too long ago, I could just drive to my designated polling place, have them check off my name, vote, and a day or so later, I would read the results in the local paper or watch the results on some "breaking" TV special. Simple and easy.

Now, I have to read countless Geek and non-geek election and voting guides so that I can come to the realization that the candidate I had chosen long ago is still the one I am actually going to vote for. Then, I'll have to file appropriate paperwork for a "conditional ballot" should I decide that my designated polling place is "not convenient" for me. Then, once at the polling place, I'll have to dodge international election monitors, and dodge partisan bullies just to get into the polling place. Then, I have to hope that my votor registration has been logged properly so that I can vote. Once on the voting booth, I then will have to thoroughly discriminate the voting process to ensure that the new e-voting machine actually works and make sure a paper copy prints so that the inevitable recounts can be handled properly. Then, when I get home, I have to monitor the countless state-by-state and county-by-county real-time returns, monitor countless voting fraud sites, all the while filtering out sincere, yet consistently contradictory election commentary on main-stream media outlets.

Oh wait. I forgot. I live in South Carolina where President Bush is already locked in as the winner, so would I be better off just staying at home? Besides, some county in Florida will be deciding the election outcome anyway, right?

Time to shut off the PC and go Outside(TM) for a nice walk.