In this day and age, why do we still vote with pen and paper?
With all the technology we have these days (internet, touch-screens etc), why are we still voting with pen and paper? It can't be good for the environment, and it wouldn't require people to count votes individually (therefore allowing human error and / or corruption). Is there a reason the whole world is encouraging us to go paperless EXCEPT for elections? The Government must trust technology, because they put all of our other personal details where it can be hacked. Why is voting different? It all seems very suspicious...
Anonymous2019-03-31T02:21:01Z
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Paper ballots are the best solution for election security. All electronic voting is potentially liable to hacking. Thre's also no way to go back and double check results to make sure theyre accurate. Counting paper ballots isn't time consuming. The advantages of paper ballots are first that it's essentially impossible to hack. Unless the people running the polling place are corrupt and stuffing ballots you're not going to get fraud. They can also be checked. If an electronic voting machine is hacked all you can do is ask it for the tally and get the same result again. You an actually go back and check paper ballots to make sure the count is accurate.
Other details of our lives are online, but the stakes are lower and the ability to correct it is there. For example, my bank has a lot of incentive to make sure my bank account is secure and has lots of resources to secure it. Election machine companies have less incentive to secure voting machines since they sell a limited number of them and they are only used one day every couple of years. If my bank account does get hacked and my money stolen I'm likely to notice that and the bank has procedures to reconstitute me. If worse comes to worse, the federal government can bail me out. With voting there's no way to easily know if fraud has occured. if someone switched my vote on an electronic voting machine how would I ever know that? How would you know that some surprise victory was due to fraud and not just someone being more popular than expected? Moreover, the processes for redoing an election aren't well established.
Because technology is hackable. And elections are different from anything else in that you only need the data once. Receive it, count it, get a result and that's that. The good old-fashioned way works just as well for that. And you can SEE the count - how do you know what's going on inside a computer? That is always a concern in the USA's use of voting machines. With concerns about interference with elections, there is still nothing like pencil and paper for helping us to trust elections. And people do get more worried about that because an election result has so many other consequences.
In a manual count, any candidate can ask for a recount if it's a close result, and as for the environment, have you never heard of paper recycling?
Other uses of computers are where you want to keep the data continuously online, so the government has to accept that if it doesn't want to go back to doing everything by post on paper.
If you put the elections on the internet, they can be hacked. At it is, there is no way hackers can control the election process, because its way to complicated. And no, the Russians nor any other entity influenced the outcome.