Yeah, but here in NY we've had the machine voting with no real audit trail (as in, verifiable by the voter) for decades.
Good old-fashioned paper ballots remain the best technology for voting. Australia does just fine with paper - we get ~90% of the results within 3-4 hours of the close of voting, and the really close seats have to wait 2 weeks anyway, for the postals to come in.
Paper can be recounted as many times as you like, you don't get pieces falling off and chad all over the floor, and it's exactly what the voter saw (barring invisible inks and treated papers and the like). Glenn Reynolds had an article (http://www.techcentralstation.com/110502A.html) about it some time ago, and IMO he's right.
I've read several articles on the subject and they do make a good point about paper ballets. However given the complexity of some american ellections, the number of seperate votes that are going on simultanously especally with direct democracy that you'd need an awful lot of paper ballets and that would take a while to manually count.
The other side is that for the system to work you need a large number of people to do the counting. And the people for organising the counting need to be politically neutral. And an unfortuante side effect of the American system is that there are no politically neutral posts, everybody is a politcal apopintee that got there through there political affilations. Of course the plus side is that you don't have people who are not answerable to the people, like say Judges in England.
But I'll continue to resist removal of the paper ballet in England, there is no need.
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Good old-fashioned paper ballots remain the best technology for voting. Australia does just fine with paper - we get ~90% of the results within 3-4 hours of the close of voting, and the really close seats have to wait 2 weeks anyway, for the postals to come in.
Paper can be recounted as many times as you like, you don't get pieces falling off and chad all over the floor, and it's exactly what the voter saw (barring invisible inks and treated papers and the like). Glenn Reynolds had an article (http://www.techcentralstation.com/110502A.html) about it some time ago, and IMO he's right.
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The other side is that for the system to work you need a large number of people to do the counting. And the people for organising the counting need to be politically neutral. And an unfortuante side effect of the American system is that there are no politically neutral posts, everybody is a politcal apopintee that got there through there political affilations. Of course the plus side is that you don't have people who are not answerable to the people, like say Judges in England.
But I'll continue to resist removal of the paper ballet in England, there is no need.