The electronic voting machine pictured above is like the ones that are used here in Potter County. Potter County voters do not have the option of using anything else. You either vote on this machine or you don't vote.
If you are a regular reader of this blog, then you know how I feel about this machine. I simply don't trust it. It does not have a paper trail, which means there is no way to double-check the election results.
Frankly, it does not matter whether the election workers are honest or not, if the machine malfunctions, there is no way to ever be sure the votes have been counted correctly.
I know that the county uses these machines to speed up the vote count. However, there are other ways to do this. There are other electronic counters that actually count paper ballots, and can report the results of an election just as quickly. Also, if there are ever any questions about the electronic count, the paper ballots are there and can be hand-counted.
Voters and candidates can trust a machine that counts paper ballots, because these ballots can be re-counted. But how can anyone trust a machine with no paper trail of any kind? I don't care how great you think these computer voting machines are, they just can't be trusted.
Machines malfunction. That is just a fact of life. Voting is too important to be trusted to a machine prone not only to malfunctions, but also to hacking.
We must get rid of these machines and get a system the voters can trust, even if we have to go back to handcounting ballots. PDiddie over at Brains and Eggs has written an excellent post on this matter, and I urge you to read it.
What good is a system that can't be trusted?
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