Winds of Change has a good post today on the dangers in blindly trusting electronic voting machines to count ballots.
We know that there are some very unscrupulous groups participating in politics in America, as well as in other countries around the world. There will always be some who will do anything to gain power. Their fervor will grow when the stakes in an election are high.
If votes can be stolen, they will be stolen.
No system will be 100% foolproof, but we should make it very, very difficult to switch, miscount, or "lose" votes recorded by a voting machine.
In fact, I'm not even sure why it's called an electronic voting machine.
It's actually a "voting computer."
Which sounds scary, because we all know that COMPUTERS MAKE MISTAKES. OFTEN.
Actually, I think I've answered my own question about why manufacturers call them everything BUT "voting computers."
I for one would support a system not only with a paper trail, but with routine, publicly verifiable audits. For example, it should be possible for election officials to pull up my ballot from the system (only with my consent of course, using my ballot number that only I know) so that I can verify for myself that my vote was recorded correctly. It should then be possible to easily verify that my vote was fed into the vote totals correctly. This type of doublecheck should be repeated with the votes of a few hundred, a few thousand, or even more willing voters every election.
The system should not be too complicated for laypersons to understand and audit.
If a system is too complicated for laypersons to understand clearly and audit easily, then it will soon be rife with fraud.
And voting fraud is the death of democracy.
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