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February 09, 2004

Comments

iman razavi

hi mr pierre
i write this page from iran, can you help me find a job on tech ind. ?
or may be you like to make your e-bay branch in iran.

i am ready
iman razavi

Pierre Omidyar

Mr. Razavi,

I prefer not to respond to business requests on this blog. You can contact me via LinkedIn or through my office at eBay.

Best wishes,

Pierre

Alex Foley

I was reading about this on http://action.truemajority.org/action/ and was utterly surprised by the fact that there are no checks in place for computerized voting machines. It's a pity that it will take one of these insecure systems screwing up and ten years before anything is changed.

Baylea

Hi Pierre,
My name is Baylea and I am almost 14 years old doing a speech on ebay, I havent found any helpful information quite yet, do you think you would be able to forward me some information to help me win the spech competition this year? Thanks a bunch!
~*Baylea*~

Tom Munnecke

I am a student of optimism; it pays to be optimisitic when the risks are low. If all you are risking is a non-smile when you smile at someone, its good to be optimistic. However, when the risks are high, things change. You don't want an optimisitic pilot "hoping" he can take off with an overloaded plane.

The risks we face with a corrupted voting system are about as severe as anything a democracy can face. Even if the system is valid, the *impression* of fraud can be as bad as the reality. Our vote counting system needs to be above reproach.

One of my first jobs out of college was doing the vote counting software for a county government. The first thing I did was write a cross-checking system to double check the ballot counts. This was a really disruptive thing to do; my boss thought I was a trouble maker, and I was soon transferred to another project.

I also spoke with voting machine sales folks (this was in the mid 1970's) who spoke freely about the difficulty in selling vote counting machines to Cook County - officials did not want to have a "reliable" count.

This is all three decades out of date, but I suspect that there are a lot of folks out there doing vote counting software who would have some tales to tell...

This is our democracy we are talking about, an incredibly precious and hard-won achievement accomplished over centuries! Whether or not there are nefarious schemes in progress, we should be guarding the integrity of the vote-counting process like we guard the gold in Fort Knox....

We need to be all over this issue, not as a conspiracy or political issue, simply as the right thing to do.

Tom

Tom Munnecke

This just in from the San Diego Union Tribune: "Diebold Knew of Voting Machine Fault, Tech Says"... I've posted an entry at http://www.munnecke.com/blog/archives/2004_04.html#000144:

"We are dealing with the foundations of our democracy, and we are entrusting it to an unaccountable approach controlled by a single company whose technicians laugh when they disenfranchises voters."

Tom Munnecke

I've just blogged another item about this at http://www.munnecke.com/blog/archives/2004_04.html#000149 "Our Compromised Voting System"

peter

All I will say is that the encumbent powers will pull all of our strings on day soon.
The writing is on the wall but not many see the correct spelling. As each decade passes so does 10% of existing freedoms.

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