The upcoming US elections are causing a lot of people to focus on the use of electronic voting systems and the inherent issues that result. At one level this doesn’t have a lot to do with using ELNs, but it is essentially the same problem – how do you use a computer system to record a real-world act, in a way that can’t be subsequently altered. As always it comes down to well designed systems (people + technology) run competently which is surprisingly hard.
Hopefully the ensuing conversation will raise the general level of awareness of the issues involved. Ideally we’ll be able to turn the content up and marketing-speak down….
Couple of representative links: Ars Technica’s guide on how to steal an election (scary reading), and Scott Adams’s tongue-in-cheek but thought provoking post on whether it really matters anyway (which I suspect will offend the easily offended).
