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More Diebold voting kiosk news

Author: Bill Gerba on 2004-09-22 14:30:15

 Just a quick note to all those following the Diebold voting kiosk saga: a new article in Wired illustrates yet another flaw in the Diebold voting kiosk system, this one allowing people to arbitrarily change votes from a central collection area.  Obviously the repercussions for something like this could be catastrophic.  At this point I'm so disgusted by this debacle that I'm not sure of who is more to blame: Diebold, for doing a half-assed job of writing software, or the government, for doing a half-assed job of testing it.  To be fair, the decision of whether to use e-voting or not was something largely left up to state and local governments (mine included), but even so, this issues should have been addressed long ago... and if there wasn't hope of an immediate solution, the systems should have been taken out of use until they were fixed properly, even if that meant going back to paper ballots for another year or two.

The damage that this sort of news does to the interactive kiosk industry is very difficult to repair.  All of the major hardware and software players have devoted huge amounts of resources to the issues of security and reliability (WireSpring alone has logged thousands of hours working on security and stability for FireCast kiosk and digital signage software), however much of that is overshadowed due to the huge amount of press "noise" generated from the Diebold problems.  Ironically, even blog articles like this one contribute to that noise, (in some tiny, probably immesurable way), but I feel that it's more important to point out these problem deployments as mistakes that the rest of us can learn from.

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LEGAL STUFF: The WireSpring Blog is written by Bill Gerba but may periodically include articles by guest authors. The author of each article is clearly identified at the start of the article. The opinions expressed in each article are solely those of the author, and do not reflect the official opinions of WireSpring Technologies, Inc. All blog articles are copyright © 2004-2008 William F. Gerba or the guest author, as appropriate. All content besides the actual article text, e.g. surrounding branding and informational content, is copyright © 2000-2008 WireSpring Technologies, Inc. All rights reserved. Except as provided in WireSpring's Republishing and Syndication Policy, no blog content may be reproduced, in whole or in part, without WireSpring's express written consent.

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Bill Gerba is CEO of WireSpring and maintains an active role in the digital signage and self-service kiosk industries. An industry advocate since 2000, Bill is the chairman of POPAI's Digital Signage Awards and a member of the group's Education and Advocacy Committees. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences (including the Digital Signage Expo) and has been featured in numerous publications. If you would like Bill to provide feedback for a story you're working on, or you want him to speak at your event, please contact us.

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