[andrewzah]

"I had no opinion before now, but clearly these machines are unusable anywhere."

All politics aside, it's fairly obvious that electronic voting machines can be very dangerous unless they're handled very, very, very carefully. The contracts for these machines aren't going to the best of the best, they're going to the lowest bidders. As a software engineer, the idea of going from manual, verifiable tabulation to opaque software is completely horrifying.

It is significantly harder to forge thousands of paper ballots. Not impossible, but not nearly as easy as manipulating opaque software or simply gaining access to these machines.

People can actually observe and confirm the tabulation process currently. All machines should be open-source and easily audited if we want to inspire any sort of confidence in them to the average voter.