Kelvyquayo wrote:
Computer voting is bad. It adds unneeded and dangerous variables period
Why do they even want them? Just so we can be all "hi-tech" and look cool
Part of it is cost savings. It's a heck of a lot cheaper to tally the votes by computer then via card reading machines. Cheaper on paper as well (which is likely the reason why the initial versions did not include any paper trail, they were trying to eliminate the paper from the process afterall).
Another part is accuracy. At the end of the day, a certain percentage of the votes in any election are always lost due to damage ballots crumpling in the reader, mispunched ballots, rainwater getting into the box, crash while transporting the ballots, and any of a zillion other things that happen between the time you walk into the booth to vote and the vote actually gets counted.
The voting machines eliminate the majority of the things that cause votes to get lost. Obviously, they can add some new ways for those votes to get lost, but the idea is that as the technology is developed and refined, we'll end up losing vewer votes in elections, meaning that the election results are more accurate then they'd be if we used paper ballots.
And I really think that most of the people criticizing the process aren't considering that we're not creating something in a vacuum. We're replacing another system. A consideration of the security of electronic voting machines must take into account the current security of the paper ballot process. People seem to complain about the voting machines because they aren't "perfect", but neither is the system of paper ballots. Nothing is perfect. No election counting methodology is immune to tampering. The objective is to make it harder to tamper, more accurate, and cheaper. Which the Diebold voting machines do.
The fact is that you have to have much greater access to the Diebold machines in order to tamper with the votes inside then you need with a ballot box in order to do the same thing. The votes are stored on memory cards which are handled using the same physical methodology as locked ballot boxes (boxes locked with a seal affixed, two people handling the box at all times, etc). Any tampering must be done either at the final location where the votes are tallied centrally, or at the balloting place itself by inserting false voting information into the cards themselves.
In neither of those two areas are the electronic voting machines any more vulnerable then paper ballots. Until that box is locked and sealed, anyone with physical access to it can "stuff" the box with extra votes (which is where we get the term "stuffing the ballot box", right?). A similar amount of physical access would be required to change or add votes to an electronic machine at the ballot location (unless you think hooking up serial cables and hacking the machine is harder to spot then dumping extra pieces of paper into the box was...). At the central terminal, there is absolutely no difference. Paper ballots are fed into a machine that counts them then transmits the totals to computer. Electronic ballot cards collected from the voting machiens are read by a maching that counts then and tranmits the totals to the same computer. No change of security. If someone has the ability to hack into the tallying system without being detected he could change the votes no matter what method is used at the balloting place.
I've spent a good amount of time discussing this with other IT security types. While the security model isn't perfect, the general conclusion is that it's at worse identially insecure to using paper ballots, and at best significantly more secure. That's a "win" all around.