Court refuses to lift California e-voting restrictions

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I actually agree with you, but for different reasons.

I agree wholeheartedly that lazy people should get off their butts and vote. But some people, like those sent to work overseas (especially military personnel) and the disabled need another option.

However, absentee ballots offer these people the perfect solution. Now I do believe the only people who should qualify for this solution are the disabled and out of town working folk. But while I don't think absentee ballots have been around 200 years, they've certainly been employed for quite some time and work rather well.

I do think there will be a day when e-voting will become feasible, but until then, don't try to fix what isn't broken. The Florida fiasco was solved because there was a paper trail.

Some may say "Yeah, but some people who wanted to vote for Al Gore inadvertantly voted for Pat Buchanan, so what good did the paper trail do them?". And I'll say well at least the paper trail enabled an investigation into the matter. And you can fix that particular problem without having to resort to a paperless system. And finally, imagine what kind of fiasco it would have been had there NOT been a paper trail.

Any system should make a paper trail that must be inspected and turned in by the voter. An electronic system is great if it creates a paper receipt that the voter can inspect, because if done properly, there can be no mistakes (e.g. if you vote for Bush, it would have his name only on the receipt, not a criss cross of all the candidate's names with a check mark kinda near one name but also kinda near another). This way if the voter turns in a name that he did not intend, the fault lies clearly with him, not a hanging chad or a poorly formatted ballot.

Posted by: Michael Kelly   Posted on: 07/08/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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