Re: Guess they didn't use an iSeries... Windows for a voting solution? Puleeeeze!

[Larry Bolhuis <lbolhuis@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Some time back some friends and I were talking about how the heck you 
could possibly trust winDOHs anything to actually count votes in such a 
way that Reliably is insured and Fraud is impossible. We decided (rather 
quickly) that you just couldn't. With i5/OS however it seems to me that 
the answer is so simple that it's elegant. Use any freekin front end 
that you want to do the voting, web browser, 5250 screen, windows 
program with ODBC, whatever, don't care. In any case when the vote hits 
the database (which will *ABSOLUTELY be journaled) you scrape the 
journal. The Journal contains everything the voter did and you use that 
transaction to spit out the voters ticket, NOT the voting machine. In 
other words what the voter gets out of the voting machine is not simply 
a reflection of what they put into the machine, rather it's downstream 
of the actual votes that were posted. If the voter then verifies the 
ballot in their hand is correct, shazamm no fraud, and you vote is 
already in the DB. If required a list of votes could also be printed at 
the precinct as the tickets come out but hey, it's in the journal so 
it's in the DB. Done deal.

Another example of the System i, and i5/OS being an integrated solution, 
and kicking the **** out of M$.

- Larry

Joe Pluta wrote:
> Cook County is embroiled in controversy yet again, although this time it's
> the machines not The Machine.  Nearly a week after elections, votes are
> still being counted - votes that were supposed to be counted automatically
> by the Sequoia Voting Systems electronic balloting machines.  And while
> Sequoia insists that their systems are more secure than Diebold's because
> they don't use Windows, as it turns out this is only the voting machine
> itself.  The back end "WinEDS" system (which does the tallying and
> reporting) uses Microsoft SQL Server as its database, and evidently it has a
> problem counting a million or so votes.
>
> DB2/400 posts a million transactions in seconds (or maybe minutes, but
> certainly not days!).
>
> I'm being a bit facetious here.  From what I could see, voters vote on a
> touch screen, then the touch screen results are printed out on special
> forms, which are then fed into a reader.  It's the reader that seems to be
> the bottleneck.  But I'm just guessing.
>
> Joe