| Unfortunately, it's not quite that simple. An advantage of electronic voting is that the machines can be designed for use by the blind. This is in fact one of the goals written into the act of Congress which funded the development of the machines originally. Political advocacy groups for the blind oppose using paper logging, because it would mean that the only authoritative record of the vote is the one that blind people cannot personally confirm. A machine could read the paper out to the blind vote, but that just changes which electronic device you have to trust to report the vote correctly. A sighted person could confirm the ballot for them, but that was already possible in the past (and was how the blind voted until now). Electronic voting was an advance for the blind specifically because an individual could vote on their own with no assistance other than that provided by the machine. From a security perspective, it is at least as plausible that the sighted assistant would manipulate the vote of the blind person as it is plausible that a hacker would manipulate the votes on an electronic system. It can be argued that although both scenarios are plausible, hacking is more likely and has a larger impact, but arguments based on relative costs and benefits are a poor match for an emotional debate on civil rights. |
The blind voting advocacy groups sound like they are completely against anything that allows a vote log to be confirmable outside the (extremely vulnerable) blackbox voting machine. I begin to wonder where their funding comes from.