I heard that during an interview as a Project Management philosophy. It made sense to me. My understanding is that complexity grows exponentially with respect to the addition of new things. That's because each new thing has to have a relationship with every thing else that is already there.
Uncertainty is the bane of any electoral process. The closer the election, the greater the affect of uncertainty. Let's say a process is 99% accurate. That would seem OK, wouldn't it? Nope! In the Oakland mayorial campaign, It's been a week and they are within less than 1% away from not needing a runoff. In fact, the candidate is less than .25% away and there are still at least 1% of the outstanding ballots to figure out.
They have already thrown out enough votes to render the election uncertain. Why? Because people filled in more than one blob on the ballot. What they really wanted couldn't be figured out.
Do we need a runoff? No one can say with mathematical certitude
I say we use CD's instead of paper. Anyone with a PC can read them. You just open the vote log file and start counting the lines by hand. Post the file to the internet, and thousands of people can count them.
Too expensive. And, how can you know that what was written on the CD is what the voter wanted?
Well, If you have the program code, you can know what the machine did. If you read the CD while the voter is still in the booth, you can just ask them!
Diebold and those other companies will never let just anyone read their code.
Well, We don't need their code! We use something called Open Source. You probalby use open source every day, but do not realize it. One simple example is Tivo. All Tivo boxes use Linux. That's an operating system like XP, but without the big MicroSoft logo. There are thousands of professionals and well known sites on the internet with all the software and machines we need to cooperatively develop something as simple as a voting machine.