[Your Nightmare]

Studies have shown that the most accurate method for voting is marking you selection on a piece of paper (check your vote with a pencil) and putting that piece of paper through an optical reader. The optical readers are very accurate, it provides for a paper trail, and if a human being (remember them?) has to review the ballot it is very easy for them to determine what the voter's intent was (no hanging/dimpled chads, no blue screens of death, hacking, or crashed hard drives).

Computer-based voting is a HUGE disaster waiting to happen. As someone who uses and loves computer technology, I am not so naive to think that computers can solve every problem. This is one where the situation is too important to leave to the machines.

[jimfree]

Voted with touch screen last November in Prince George's County, Maryland. Didn't have much impact on the county races but we elected Bob Erlich to the governorship and retired Kathleen Kennedy Townsend from politics.

[txhurl]

Electronic voting machines discovered to be easily hacked

Thread is hard to read, but worrisome.

[supercat]

Computer-based voting is a HUGE disaster waiting to happen. As someone who uses and loves computer technology, I am not so naive to think that computers can solve every problem. This is one where the situation is too important to leave to the machines.

Actually, computers can do a lot to improve things, if they are used properly. For example, use the optical-scan ballot boxes, but (1) have each ballot marked with a unique machine-readable ID(*); (2) have the machine keep a record of all the ballots cast; and (3) publish for any interested parties a list of all ballots cast. It then would be a simple matter for any interested party to compare the ballots cast against the count posted.

(*) To prevent vote-buying or extortion, the ID should not be visible to the person casting the vote

After the election, representatives of each party could select at random a number of ballots from various precincts to physically inspect. If 100 ballots selected at random all match perfectly, odds are very good that the recorded counts are within 2% of being correct. If 1000 ballots selected at random all match perfectly, odds are very good that the recorded counts are within 0.2%.

If ballots are uniquely marked and trackable, full manual recounts like the Florida circus are unnecessary. Spot-check audits would provide better verification at much lower cost.