International Law

Sequoia Voting Machines Company Threatening Ed Felten

By Karl-Friedrich Lenz

in an e-mail published on Felten’s blog here.

That seems to be not a very smart thing to do. Why should any voter trust this company if they run around threatening people who want to analyze their machines? Sequoia should welcome and help any analysis by experts, since that is the only way to earn trust.

Then again, anybody trusting computers with their vote has got things wrong already. Even if the machines are run by a company that has some basic clues about security design and not by one that uses legal threats to shut up criticism, the resulting reliability will always be vastly inferior to just using paper ballots and have humans count them.

Voting machines should be thrown out immediately everywhere. But Sequoia should go first after nuking their credibility completely with these threats.

Full post as published by Lenz Blog on March 20, 2008 (boomark / email).