Dutch Voting Machines De-Certified

Peer writes "The Dutch government has officially decided that it will no longer use voting machines (Babel Fish Translation) for elections. So it's pencil and paper from now on. Activists have been campaigning against the use of voting machines for some time."

Re:Some pedant has probably corrected 'begs' alrea

[Eco-Mono]

For instance, one of these [wired.com] but with a human-readable bar code along the left side.

A better translation

[Sara Chan]

Google Translate gives a better translation than Babelfish:
http://www.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.minbzk.nl%2Factueel%2F112441%2Fnieuw&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=nl&tl=en [google.com]

Ironic

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems a bit ironic that all this fuss is made about the secrecy and accountability of those voting machines, while the parties that we (the Dutch) elect with these machines are so expressedly in favour of recording every bit of information about the citizens.
Next week a law proposal will be accepted that forces telcos and ISPs to keep records of all communications by all of their subscribers, not just those for which some tap warrant has been issued, and store them for 18 months or maybe more.
And of course we already are the number-1 country for taps on telephony and internet traffic.
The next proposal, to require everyone using an internet cafe or buying a mobile phone to present an ID (and presumably all those sessions and phones to be registered with that ID) was brought forward this week.

All this for the sake of easing the finding of criminals. It seems strange that it is not required to register each citizens vote as well, as that could provide as much of a clue as what sites he is visiting.

Re:Too little added value

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone from the Netherlands i'd like to add a few things;

We actually have had voting machines for years, but last year they have been proven to be unsafe (which had been suspected for a pretty long time already); it was shown that you could actually read out what vote was being cast remotely.

Also, the machines made the voting process non-transparent, which probably goes against a whole bunch of national and international laws, and even our constitution.

So they decided to actually drop them (and all investments in them so far), until they find a way to actually make voting machines safe and reliable for something as important as democracy rather than injecting more money to rush things for the next election.

This is in my opinion a very brave decision, and i must say i haven't been as proud of my country and government as i am now for years.

btw. the illiteracy point is moot; the machines we used were purely text-based so if you can't read you can't use them anyway

Links in article...

[rew]

Please mention the "real" URL: http://www.minbzk.nl/actueel/112441/nieuw [minbzk.nl] and provide the link for the translation behind in parentheses. Even though Dutch is a language spoken by a relatively small number of world citizens, there are some who prefer the Dutch language.

I myself prefer to read English unless Dutch is the original language.