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Sparky
Lv 6
Sparky asked in Politics & GovernmentElections · 2 years ago

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...

10 Answers

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  • Anonymous
    2 years ago
    Favorite Answer

    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.

  • Warren
    Lv 7
    2 years ago

    I am a retired electrical engineer, spent most of my career doing software, the last 20 years in aerospace. This is a most unforgiving endeavor, the consequences of an undetected error can be serious. These range from pretty trivial to the loss of a very expensive mission (this HAS happened, multiple times!), and in the worst case the loss of life (this has never happened). The amount of attention to detail in analysis, design, and testing when human life is at risk is just insane, as it should be! I was involved in one of these, a very complex sensor system for the ISS life support system. I should point out that once delivered, none of the code I was responsible for ever required any corrections, I took this work VERY seriously! Based on my experience, I DO NOT trust a completely computerized voting system without paper backup.

    The question implied that the only alternative to paperless computer voting is old style hand counted paper ballots, which is NOT true! In California the details of the voting systems are determined by each county. In my county we vote on mark sense paper ballots, which are then counted by a computerized system. In the event of a recount, the ballots can be hand counted.

  • 2 years ago

    Electronic voting can be changed

  • Clive
    Lv 7
    2 years ago

    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.

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  • Kini
    Lv 7
    2 years ago

    We should do more paper ballots because the electronic ones can be hacked and are unreliable.

  • Jeff D
    Lv 7
    2 years ago

    Electronic voting is much easier to hack.

  • 2 years ago

    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.

  • 2 years ago

    Pen and paper doesn’t constantly freeze, take ages to boot up, need charging or rely on WiFi all the time. We don’t want the votes to be lost as a result of failing hardware...

  • Anonymous
    2 years ago

    harder to fake-it ......................................

  • 2 years ago

    If you are asking about the USA then the method of recording votes varies from state to state.

    My state (Louisiana) uses voting machines, but the machines are never connected to the Internet.

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