On my friday drive I had a few ideas. First, I saw the Boulder bumper sticker on a Subaru that said: “If machines count, votes don’t!” The first thing that flashed into my head was an image of my ballot (at least the printout receipt I got last time) hunched over the Milk desk pencil in hand hunched over a list of sums. 1+1=?, 1+2=? - easy stuff. There is a bubble that says of course votes can’t count. That is silly. It made me think, that the message on the sticker is false marketing, a fallacy. Show me the human who can count perfectly - every time at a scale to measure the national election. Go on, show me, I’ll wait. There may be one or two people who are wired up to be able to count reliably, but those individuals are rare and even if they could scale up they probably have more interesting things to do than tally up a vote. The sticker is disingenuous because it is implying that the system is being abused because a machine counts the tally sheets, that (implicitly) humans did a better job before the machines took over. Machines do mess up and that is why we need an open relationship with those who are tasked with creating hte machines. But that is easily accomplished these days if we really wanted to, I mean Google has the technology to identify media that is streaming through their network that one of it’s billions of users has not paid for so why can’t we openly and easily count votes. Not. That. Hard. well, a little hard lets go snowboarding. Voting I don’t know about, snowboarding I can do. I’ll be up there on Sunday morning.
1/14/2012 ~ 2 min read
