The error rate from hanging chads is in the tiny fraction of a percent. It was ridiculously anomalous in Florida in 2000 that this fraction of a percent actually mattered.
With a computerized voting machine, you can use any of a hundred easy methods, published online, to alter the entire tally of the voting machine, which could be hundreds of votes, in moments. The privacy shield which keeps your vote private will typically provide more then enough privacy to keep anybody from seeing what you're doing. And voila, you've changed potentially hundreds of votes.
With paper ballots, the best you can really hope to do is stuff a couple extra ballots in the box. If you're really good, you might get 2 or 3 extra votes. However, it's EXTREMELY risky. You can't take care of this in the privacy of your voting booth. You need to be sneaky while inserting the ballot into the box, so if the poll workers are paying attention you could be in a lot of trouble. The people with enough slight of hand to pull this off without significant risk are much fewer and far between then the people with the minimal technical expertise required to hack a voting machine, and the pay-off is WAY smaller.
Now, if you have a situation where the majority of the poll workers at a given precinct are corrupt, and working together, then you're pretty much screwed. They can hack the voting machines at their leisure, OR stuff the ballot box. However, if they're stuck with stuffing the ballot boxes, they increase the total number of votes. They need to make sure that matches the paperwork (i.e. the number of people who are checked off as having voted matches the number of votes), which is limited by the voter registration levels. If they push that too far, and have, say, a 90% voter turn-out, that will raise eyebrows, and possibly trigger an investigation. I believe they typically also keep track of the number of blank ballots they start with, so if they start removing existing ballots from the ballot box to bring the numbers down, that will result in another suspicious incongruity. This would take some doing anyway, since the ballot boxes are typically locked, and the poll workers aren't normally given the keys. If they start calling people to figure out who ACTUALLY voted, the truth would come out pretty quickly.
It may be a bit unlikely that this investigation would actually occur, but at least with paper ballots it's possible. With computerized voting machines, they can just go and alter all the existing votes, without changing the total number of votes, leaving behind absolutely no trail, and no evidence.
There is a compromise to this, though. Ideally, there should be a computerized voting machine which prints a paper ballot when you're done. You can then review the paper ballot, confirm that it came out correct, and if it did, put it in the ballot box. If it did NOT come out correct, you can feed it back into the machine and start over. This way, you get the convenience of a computerized interface to cast your vote, and yet still have a paper trail for latter investigation.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
zaluzianskya and ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
skylark_photos
no subject
Date: 2008-06-04 12:36 am (UTC)With a computerized voting machine, you can use any of a hundred easy methods, published online, to alter the entire tally of the voting machine, which could be hundreds of votes, in moments. The privacy shield which keeps your vote private will typically provide more then enough privacy to keep anybody from seeing what you're doing. And voila, you've changed potentially hundreds of votes.
With paper ballots, the best you can really hope to do is stuff a couple extra ballots in the box. If you're really good, you might get 2 or 3 extra votes. However, it's EXTREMELY risky. You can't take care of this in the privacy of your voting booth. You need to be sneaky while inserting the ballot into the box, so if the poll workers are paying attention you could be in a lot of trouble. The people with enough slight of hand to pull this off without significant risk are much fewer and far between then the people with the minimal technical expertise required to hack a voting machine, and the pay-off is WAY smaller.
Now, if you have a situation where the majority of the poll workers at a given precinct are corrupt, and working together, then you're pretty much screwed. They can hack the voting machines at their leisure, OR stuff the ballot box. However, if they're stuck with stuffing the ballot boxes, they increase the total number of votes. They need to make sure that matches the paperwork (i.e. the number of people who are checked off as having voted matches the number of votes), which is limited by the voter registration levels. If they push that too far, and have, say, a 90% voter turn-out, that will raise eyebrows, and possibly trigger an investigation. I believe they typically also keep track of the number of blank ballots they start with, so if they start removing existing ballots from the ballot box to bring the numbers down, that will result in another suspicious incongruity. This would take some doing anyway, since the ballot boxes are typically locked, and the poll workers aren't normally given the keys. If they start calling people to figure out who ACTUALLY voted, the truth would come out pretty quickly.
It may be a bit unlikely that this investigation would actually occur, but at least with paper ballots it's possible. With computerized voting machines, they can just go and alter all the existing votes, without changing the total number of votes, leaving behind absolutely no trail, and no evidence.
There is a compromise to this, though. Ideally, there should be a computerized voting machine which prints a paper ballot when you're done. You can then review the paper ballot, confirm that it came out correct, and if it did, put it in the ballot box. If it did NOT come out correct, you can feed it back into the machine and start over. This way, you get the convenience of a computerized interface to cast your vote, and yet still have a paper trail for latter investigation.