Election Officials Hoping E-Voting Machines With Paper Receipts Fail
from the because-democracy-is-too-difficult dept
You would think that the goal of an election official would be to help guarantee the most accurate election possible, promoting the benefits of democracy. However, it seems that that's not true at all. We've already talked about election officials who have decided to ignore rules requiring their electronic voting machines be more secure and others who are suing because they don't want to make their machines more secure. However, now that Nevada is going to use e-voting machines with a paper trail, many election officials are hoping the machines will fail just to say "I told you so!" Once again, they're missing the point. It is very likely that some of the machines will have bugs - and all of these election officials will start screaming about them. However, the problem with the current e-voting machines is that no one knows if there are bugs or not in how the votes are actually counted. Just because you've set up the system to not inform you if something goes wrong, it doesn't mean that everything has gone right. Shouldn't we trust a system that will at least let us double check if something has gone wrong more than one that doesn't let us check at all? Of course, the article notes that the paper trail in these Nevada elections will be useless, because it doesn't qualify as a legitimate ballot to be recounted. In other words, the only point of using e-voting with the paper trail in these elections is to see if the machines jam up, and then let election officials complain loudly about the problems with paper receipt e-voting machines.
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Election Officials...
While I think most election officials see voting machines as the silver bullet that will "increase efficiency and lower costs," and thus will fight against anything that would stand in the way of their adoption, these are public officials, and should be held responsible for their actions when they are contrary to the truth (and they know it, or at least should have known it.) Sure, people make mistakes, but when your mistakes are pointed out to you, you should realize the mistakes and try to fix them. These folks aren't even trying...they are perfectly happy with status quo and will fight tooth and nail to prevent anyone from calling their blessed machines what they really are, pieces of junk with no accountability and a danger to this country's future unless accountability is restored. Quite frankly, in this last election, I began to agree with the idiots who said their votes don't count...I didn't think mine did either, because there were far too many opportunities for fraud, misuse, and abuse of the system.
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