Interesting story from Fortune about Diebold, the company that makes a lot of touch-screen voting machines and has been attacked recently for rigging elections, or messing up elections unintentionally, or both (witness the earlier post about how to rig elections). Diebold did seem to be rather dodgy from the snippets that made it to the front of the newspaper, but one about which most people know pretty little. Seems to me that Fortune does gloss too quickly over the company's errors, but the real take-home message I see is just a reminder of how fantastically stupid some bureaucratic/corporate decisions are.
One thought that just hit me: The process of improving voting machines (spurred on by the federal largesse of the Help America Vote Act of 2002) seems so far to be a botch job, but maybe in a couple years we'll look back and say that this dumb approach actually got the job done in a fairly reasonable time. Sure, it's not as fast as you could imagine it happening if it were run by an omniscient, benevolent dictator, but in case you haven't noticed, they're in short supply at the federal government.
