Hand-counting votes = guaranteed wrong

Published on December 13, 2004 By Splateaux In Politics

Every time I hear someone bring up electronic ballot machines, and computer systems to count and keep track of the votes, they get shot down. People are afraid that if computers do it, it'll be "hacked" and the "bad guys" will cheat.

In my opinion, this is crap is so many different ways:

1. People count votes now. So, it guaranteed wrong. Especially if you look at the segment of the population that actually does the counting. Is it bankers or other people who are used to counting, and are more apt to get the count right? NO! It's retired people and volunteers who don't work during the day. So, we take a group who has less practice at this type of thing, and let them count the votes for our elections. There's no way in heck any election in our government has actually been accurate.

2. If enough resources were provided in the development process for the system for counting these votes, it wouldn't be that hard to make it pretty "dummy proof." My wifey works in network security, so I'm constantly hearing about hackers, and etc... but it wouldn't be hard, in my opinion, to design a system where the only vulnerability would be a physical type (which exists now), which would eliminate the vast majority of avenues that hackers have.

3. I have to get back to work, so I'll think of some more reasons why the current system should be replaced by a computer system later

Comments

Bryan

on Sep 19, 2005

I'd be fine with electronic vote-counting *if* there were assurances that the counts could be verified if necessary. For some reason (which is telling, to me), companies don't want to keep paper trails or reveal source code. My concern is that with today's system, we could recount if something funny was up. With electronic vote counting machines (and no backup paper trail), a vote could be so easily rigged, and the trail perfectly covered up.

Don't believe the hype.

www.votescam.com/home1.php

-Bryan

Spc Nobody Special

on Sep 19, 2005

So, we take a group who has less practice at this type of thing, and let them count the votes for our elections

Let's see.....1 + 1 = 2, 2 + 1 = 3, 10,014 + 1 = 10,015....
Not exactly talking rocket science here.

We did it that way in America for 200 years, what's wrong with a hand count?

The only major concern you have with a hand count is maintaining good security to prevent falsified elections. Of course that's still an issue in computer tallied elections, but what the hell......

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