The E-Voting Roundtable

from the don't-kill-each-other... dept

John Paczkowski from the San Jose Mercury News is running an excellent online roundtable discussion concerning electronic voting. The discussion includes people who are strongly opinionated on all sides of the debate -- which makes for some entertaining reading. My problem with those defending the current system is that their arguments tend to fall into three categories: (1) old systems are just as bad (2) e-voting with paper backup has its own problems and (3) the systems just work, okay? All three of these strike me as being weak arguments. Just because the old systems don't work well and because paper backups have their own problems it doesn't mean we shouldn't be striving to come up with better systems. The last one is just laughable. First, part of the problem is that it's difficult to tell whether or not they actually work, because there's no way to check them out. And, there are way too many incidents where the e-voting machines have clearly been shown not to work. With that background, why not add a better system to make sure those who want to vote can actually vote properly?

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