At 10:16 05-11-2002 -0800, John Giorgis wrote:
A few comments.http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/techwrapper.jsp?PID=1051-250&CID=1051-110502A
First, paper ballots are not as resistant to fraud and error as the author wants his audience to believe. People involved in counting the votes will have vast numbers of ballots going through their hands; it is easy count a vote as one for candidate A, while the vote was actually for candidate B (either intentionally (fraud) or unintentionally (human error, caused by the monotonous nature of the job)).
Second, the process of counting all those votes can take several days, which makes it look rather outdated in this era of "I need the results yesterday".
Third, there is the environmental issue: printing all those forms for all those millions of voters is going to cost you a lot of trees.
Fourth, all those piles of papers have to be stored somewhere. The ballots from just one election take up quite a lot of valuable storage space.
The alternative: electronic voting. And with that I do not mean the voting machines that are currently in use in the US, I mean real electronic voting, which does not require any pieces of paper to be marked or punched. And rather than needing entire warehouses to store all the ballots from all those elections, all you need is a harddisk and a backup tape.
Impossible? No - we have been doing it that way for over a decade here in The Netherlands. All you need to do is look at the board, find the name of the candidate you wish to vote for, press the button beside the candidate's name, press "Confirm", and you are done. When the polling station closes, the final results are sent on to another computer which processes the totals of all the polling stations. It is simple, it is safe, and it is fast: the final nationwide results are known within a few hours after the polling stations close.
So, why is it that such a technologically advanced nation as the US is still using outdated technology, while some European country has been using a high-tech solution for over a decade already?
Jeroen "Europe Rulez!" van Baardwijk
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