Good for California
Those are not words that leave my lips on a regular basis, but California has showed uncommon sense for a change. On Friday, their secretary of state decertified all touch-screen voting systems in the state because there was no way to audit the votes in case of a problem (e.g., fraud, power failures, programming mistakes, etc.).
Electronic voting is too open to fraud without a paper trail. I appreciate the advantages of electronic voting and support it, so long as the process also generates a paper trail in such a way that the voter sees the paper receipt before he leaves the facility. This is not difficult to implement (colleges have been using scan forms for many decades) and would prevent many potential problems.
You aren't implying there are frequent power outages in California, are you? We recalled that Governor. Remember? :-)
Posted by: Drew | 05/03/2004 - 04:33 PM
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Yeah, I was pretty pleased too. I shudder to think of all the shennanigans that could be pulled without paper to back it up.
Heck, something as simple as a power-outage during election day (and California has never experienced those!) could cause problems, increasing the cost of the election and just generally causing problems.