Thought provoking, clever take-off of original..good work..5's

Your choice of song was off the wall
Still, I think you spoke for us all
When people trust some darn machine
Elections seldom come out clean
Hackety Hack (Bush is back)!

5-5-5!

I guess there will be no full democracy anywhere in the world until people are allowed to, willing to, and able to vote totally open on some sort of public register. I don't know how that could be done... wait a minute, maybe I do... *changes carreer and moves into politics only to get voted the hell out of sight at first chance because there's obviously nothing voters everywhere hate as much as an honest candidate* :-)

Yes, Peter - I first came up with the theory that a candidate's electability was inversely proportional to his (or her) honesty when I was twelve or thirteen... but I was young and idealistic then: it surprises me to think how early cynicism set in
Ingeborg - lovely :-)
AFW - thanks :-)

Yes, Phil, and anybody with half a brain (I think you have a title later in the listing about that) could have seen this coming. Isn't Diebold a Texas Corporation? Not sure about that, but one or more of these "failure-proof" automated voting machine outfits is. To use ANY system that doesn't provide and audit trail is criminal when you are dealing with vote counting in an election. I am not a programmer, but from doing phone support for a software company that produced Income Tax Software that programming errors can occur that cause errors in COMPUTATIONS. And programmers can make honest or otherwise mistakes, too. So why no audit trail? Who could possibly think this should be acceptable in a voting system? Sigh...Well, I'm voting three 5's here, hope they don't end up in somebody elses parody.

Well done, Phil! Paul - The chairman of Diebold is a Bush supporter who said (for publication) that he looked forward to "delivering the state of Ohio for George Bush". But this was an honest election, right?

From a software point of view, there is no excuse for failing to put in an audit (I've told clients off recently for asking me to delete audited data :-)).

Although... from an election point of view, "ballot", in the strictest sense of the word, implies complete secrecy in the vote, in which case an audit may not be desirable as you could trace votes (which you can do with most modern paper votes, too).

Either way... the song rocks :-)

Paul - I wouldn't bother reading "half a brain", it's not one of my best. Back on-topic: I find some of the "programming errors" hard to credit... a few thousand votes here or there when all you have to do is count?
Ravyn - well, if they have a thorough and independent investigation that proves it was an honest election, then I'll accept it. If there's no investigation at all, then we can be pretty sure that a) it wasn't honest and b) they know
Adam - ah, another techie... somehow I'm not surprised. But it's quite possible to make your audit not traceable back to the voter, if required - one thought I had I mentioned here: http://www.inthe00s.com/index.php/topic,4605.0.html about a possible belt-and-braces solution. Either way... thanks :-)

Diebold Corporate Headquarters

Diebold, Incorporated
5995 Mayfair Road
P.O. Box 3077
North Canton, Ohio USA 44720-8077

Phone number

1-330-490-4000
Sorry Paul, This would have really been interesting if Diebold was based out of Texas but alas it is not. Interesting that it IS located in Ohio, however.

Phil - I really like what you did with this classic. And thanks for the plug. Ingie commented on mine earlier and I was puzzled why anyone would drag out such an old parody from the archives and comment, but for some unknown reason I went all day and missed this until now. Fitting parody for an IM professional to write. Well done. 5 NTFS errors, 5 crosslinked files and 5 lookup errors.

Thanks, un-Texan, for the FYI.

Thanks, Guy - looking at my comment on yours, I must have been thinking along the same lines back then; but in this case I wanted to write one on this specific theme and the title kind of jumped out at me. :-)

I've always liked the original song. You kind of kept the theme in place too. Loved it!

What - you don't trust computers? They're totally impartial. They only do what they're told to do by - um - wait a minute...

Exactly, Spaff- I trust computers to do what I tell them to (with the possible exception of using MS Word - then you never know quite what it's going to do)... but when software is written that is a) kept confidential, b) doesn't leave any usable audit trail and c) is used to elect the most powerful man in the world.. and for "democracy" we go invading other countries?

lo Bold BE goNE!