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by Loughla
1320 days ago
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Yes and no. There is never a situation where electronic voting with no paper back up that must be stored and catalogued for a prescribed time via law is a good idea. But a system that uses electronics to tabulate votes that can be verified via paper ballots that are stored long-term, securely? Why not? Edit: Maybe I didn't describe this well. The person makes the vote on paper. The paper is counted by a machine (like the article is saying). The paper is stored securely and catalogued for later reference and audit. What is the problem there? |
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If the paper ballots as backup are manually created by the voter then while it’s still possible it’s much harder to fake the votes en masse but there’s more scope for human error (what if they vote in two different ways). If the paper backup is automatically generated then can they check it? If not then there’s little improvement over purely digital voting. If yes, do they actually check it? Many won’t bother and maybe there’s an exploit there. Then there’s the fact that this system would require regular auditing, and lawsuits and close contests will force a certain number of audits every election. No one can reliably predict which districts will require audits so presumably they’ll need to hire sufficient people to do a manual recount anyway which eliminates the labor cost advantage.
If by using electronic voting we are opening up new potential exploits, even with paper backups, and not really gaining much of an advantage why would we go to the expense and bother of implementing electronic voting?