Via Wired:It was simultaneously an uh-oh moment and an ah-ha moment.
When Sequoia Voting Systems demonstrated its new paper-trail electronic voting system for state Senate staffers in California last week, the company representative got a surprise when the paper trail failed to record votes that testers cast on the machine.
That was bad news for the voting company, whose paper-trail, touch-screen machine will be used for the first time next month in Nevada's state primary. The company advertises that its touch-screen machines provide "nothing less than 100 percent accuracy."
It was good news, however, for computer scientists and voting activists, who have long held that touch-screen machines are unreliable and vulnerable to tampering, and therefore must provide a physical paper-based audit trail of votes. You know, this is just another example of why e-voting is an awful idea. I'm all for the idea of it, actually, but in reality it's way too prone to tampering. The thing is, no matter what, you can't really make it secure even WITH a paper trail. Think about it - even if the machine prints out for you the same thing that it showed on the screen, it could still only be printing that out then recording the vote you made as something else. A paper trail is just a false sense of security; it means nothing in reality.
For this system, I'd feel far more comfortable with standard voting methods.
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