Not every political campaign can boast that it only took two years for their goals to be reached, but that’s exactly what the Dutch campaign against voting computers can do. Of course to a certain extent they were swimming with the political tide, so to speak. The election disasters in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 had shown the dangers of relying on voting computers and how easy they could be manipulated by people with malign intents, and when that theoretical danger turned out to be not so theorethical as both types of voting computer in use in the Netherlands turned out to be easily hackable, things came to a head. Already the most vulnerable machine had to be withdrawn just before the last elections and last year a parliamentary commission to investigate voting systems came with their proposal for a safer voting computer, but even this turned out to have problems. So last week the ministry of home affairs bit the bullet and decided to go back to the red pencil.
Now if only the US followed suit. (Hattip: Avedon.)