the joy of voting

posted by jack at 03:37 CET in / politics

I found an interesting article about the problems with the touch-screen voting terminals that are starting to be used all over America.

Most of the problems boil down to the fact that these are closed systems whose workings are impossible for any outsider to examine or verify. There's literally no way to know if the machines are recording votes accurately, or whether through error or mischief they are recording and reporting incorrect results. It seems to me that the easiest, best solution (as proposed in the article) is that after entering everything, the machine should print out a paper ballot for the voter to verify, and those ballots should then be saved in case a recount is required. Presumably the paper copy and the electronic copy would be tagged identically so that given a paper ballot, you could find the electronic ballot and see if it matches what was printed.

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