Electronic Voting Is Stupid
The problems with electronic voting machines are threefold:
- Your votes can be changed and there’s no record if they’re changed.
- Pen is permanent and cannot be hidden.
- Your votes cannot be authenticated.
- It’s difficult to forge a signature and impossible to do on a large scale.
- The process by which votes are tabulated is not transparent.
- Counting by hand is understandable and easily verifiable.
We should use paper ballots with ink circles to indicate our votes and ink signatures to authenticate them. Votes should be counted twice by hand by two different people at two different times.
I don’t understand why people think it’s necessary to count our votes quickly. Why do we need to find out the winner the same day or even the same week? The new president isn’t inaugurated for more than a month after election day. The country didn’t grind to a halt a hundred years ago when the only way was to take a couple days to count votes by hand. I say we put priority on electing the correct candidates and not on convenience.
Tags: electronic, problems, tabulation, voting
August 26th, 2007 at 7:39 pm
Introducing a “black box” to count/register votes is just dangerous (to a democracy).
Not only should ballots be filled in manually, so there is a record, but they should all have a standard format (at least for Federal elections). The strategic/misleading configurations of some ballots serve no other purpose than to deceive voters, and earn unintended votes.