Tim Almond

Re: Montgomery to Extend Voting Hours After Election Glitches

A bunch of voting machines wouldn’t work, so voters had to come back later. That’s bad design.

I’m not impressed with the idea of voting machines. It seems to me that it’s a risky solution with very little benefit.

Paper and pencil works just fine. You don’t need operators and specialists to set it up. A box of votes doesn’t suddenly crash losing all the results (ok, it could set on fire, but that’s not going to do a hard drive much good either). A box of votes gives you much more evidence if there’s a question. It’s not prone to a software problem as people enter their choices that can screw things up.

Paper provides a more comprehensive audit trail, which the computer doesn’t. Change something on the hard drive, and you’d never have known what it was before. With paper, you’ve got the chance of some forensic evidence appearing.

It’s also much harder to rig on a large scale. Someone doing thousands of boxes is going to get noticed somewhere. Not with software. Sneak the change into the software once, and it’s out there across the board.

I know it costs money to hire people to do counting once every 4-5 years, but it’s worth it.

—–

Tags: Software Development, Technology, Design //