Re: "why use electronic voting at all?" -- I believe a lot of the
impetus for electronic voting is coming from voter rights laws
mandating increased accessibility. adamsj touched on this above,
but there's more to this than convenience and multilinguality -- in
particular, if you're blind, you just can't use a paper ballot. But
you can use the Diebold machines we have here in Berkeley; they
have little hookups for headphones so you can do everything via
audio.
Letting blind people enjoy the same rights to a secret and
convenient polling process is something I think we as a society
should support, and I doubt I'll find anyone here to disagree. I'm
not sure how this could be done without this kind of software
support. (Maybe braille ballots? how would those work?) I also
wouldn't be surprised if, all else aside, it were cheaper to run
elections on machines -- no need to print up millions of ballots,
with thousands of different variations, etc.; all that can be
handled by the machines. We need to be sensitive to benefits like
this; if I'm an election official who thinks electronic voting is
great because of reasons A, B and C, and all the people screaming
at me about the dangers appear entirely unaware of reasons A, B and
C... well, I'm much more likely to dismiss them as people who don't
understand the issues involved, and ignore them entirely.
But surely a paper trail isn't too much to ask for. I'm fairly
certain that the United States has a larger budget than my local
coffee shop; I'd like to think that Americans cared about free and
fair elections at least as much as my coffee shop cares about how
many macchiatos I ordered last week.
Comment statistics for Nathaniel Smith on the Electrolite blog
The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Nathaniel Smith:
Show all comments by Nathaniel Smith.