Do you trust voting machines?

[PolarBeer]

http://wvgazette.com/News/200810180251

I suppose the question is both "do you trust people running vote machines to not manipulate their processing" and "do you trust vote machines to work." In the case of the article above, it sounds a lot more like they just aren't working terribly well, or instructions given aren't entirely clear.

"I hate the fact that stories like this are printed. It makes everybody get scared. That is not good for anybody. Where the fault is, I don't know and the voter doesn't know."

So basically, he doesn't know what's gone wrong, and he's upset that people are concerned. Lovely.

[Seasanctuary]

What's exasperating is that the computer science community has the solution to voting machine worries, but states would rather keep paying money to certain large corporations who are more interested in company secrets than open democracy.

It's simple: voting machines should never be used to store votes.

The entire point of machine voting is to make ballots easier to fill in and read; and for bonus points to provide assistance to special needs voters. So what you do is set up voting machines to take input and PRINT OUT the official ballot.

Voters can then look at the printed ballot, make sure their candidates didn't get mysteriously swapped, then drop it in the ballot box. If something looks off, the voter can tear up and throw away that ballot and print out a new one. If the machine isn't working right, the voter can manually fill out a ballot instead. Nothing counts until dropping a human-readable ballot into the box.

That's it. The perqs of machine assisted voting without any of the suspicion.

Companies can still compete to sell products. It just won't matter what their internal code is like. All that will matter is how well they handle voter input and how infrequently their machines go out of service. No need for a confidentially agreement with official 'code checkers.' Every single voter who looks at his or her printed ballot is checking the integrity of the system.

[NeilUnreal]

I'm against any form of voting that doesn't produce a hard copy verifiable by the voter at the time the vote is cast and available for recount later.

-Neil

[rogue06]

I wholeheartedly agree with Neil and can't understand why there is opposition by so many to making the votes cast verifiable.

[themuzicman]

The problem with our system presently isn't voting machines. It's voter registration.