Voting Machines - paper vs. electronic

[Dork]

I have a question and hope someone can shed some light on all this.

Paper ballots can be worked around: 2000 illustrated that beyond a shadow of a doubt. Electronic ballots without a paper trail can do away with some of the problems, be it undervotes, overvotes or whatever else. They can also be hacked, broken into, and manipulated by shadowy Diebold/Bush secret agents.

My question is, if the argument against electronic voting machines is that people will tamper with them because of the lack of a paper trail (if only there had been a paper trail in Florida 2000! Oh wait), and that the voting machine companies are biased towards the Republicans anyway, why are paper ones more trustworthy? Paper ballots are rife with problems, and can be tampered with in similar ways anyway. Why the obsession with paper and the accompanying shady/unreliable counting practices? How is that supposed to make anything better? What good did paper ballots do in the past? Paper trails are a pretty weak defense against the kind of people who will get their buddies to make special electronic voting machines that will supposedly cause the Republicans to win, aren't they?

And what about the under/overvotes that the paper machines discount?

[Salviati]

1. Any paper trail worth its salt...

needs to be one that is verified by the voter to confirm that the vote has accurately recorded their intent. This is completely impossible on a electronic machine, how can you look at the hard drive to tell if the data stored there truely represents your vote? At least with a voter verified paper ballot, there should be a record that accurately represents the intent of the voter, and then the election issues boil down to 'just' handling these records securely...

[rock]

2. if only there had been a paper trail in Florida 2000

It is because we have a paper trail that we know Gore won Florida by 60,000 votes. Under Florida law the overvotes had to be inspected and counted. The government officals (Repugs) chose not to do so, but the newspapers did. We know this only because we had paper to look at.

[sybylla]

3. While I agree that some paper machines do present difficulties as well

states tend to have loads of regulations protecting the paper upon which votes are made and from which they are tabulated. There are regulations for the creation of ballots, the certification of ballots, the use of ballots, the chain of custody of cast ballots, provisions for monitors overseeing the counting of ballots and regulations for recounting those ballots. It's all about putting as much sunshine on the process as possible.

Conversely, we have no such protections with electronic voting machines that don't use/provide a detailed paper trail to audit in case of problems or to use in recounts. We are not allowed to see what is taking place inside the machine - no sunshine.

That's the difference. We freely acknowledge, as a society, that people make mistakes, errors in judgement, and are sometimes corrupt. Because we freely acknowldege that, we judiciously put protections in place.

Now we need to admit that those same things, errors and corruption, can effect electronic voting machines. We need to put the same protections in place and a detailed paper trail is part of that.

[stellanoir]

4. with paper ballots your looking at the

manipulation of probably tens of thousands of votes. Without paper the number of votes than can be manipulated is infinite.
There is no recourse.

Requirements for voting is that it be both anonymous and that the votes can be audited. Voting machines do not allow the latter in any way shape or form.

Go to verifiedvoting.org or blackboxvoting.com (or org) for more info.

[Andy_Stephenson]

5. Paper Ballots not...

Paper trails. In states that have ballots...they become trails once fed through the machine...and the legal ballot becomes the ballot of record. The ballot should in all cases trump the machines.

As stated earlier...Paper ballots only allow cursory tampering where with paper free machines the tampering goes bigtime.