Im not American so i dont know the specifics of how voting works there but here in Aus, your name is ticked off on a register at the voting centre before your given the bit of paper to go do your voting on. Now even if your doing it electronically surely you have to have your name marked off somewhere before you go into the electronic booth to stop you coming back and voting multiple times. It should then be fairly simple to count how many people voted at your voting centre and tallying this with the number of votes (legitimate and illegitimate) made on the electronic voting machine.

The only way i can see this system failing is if someone goes to a voting centre, goes into a booth and isnt able to/decides not to vote. I cant imagine many people going to the voting centre, lining up, waiting, getting your name crossed off, then not voting. But if someone isnt able to vote (because the system is too complex or fails) then your system should be abandoned straight away. Anyway whats wrong with the good old pencil and paper option?

What kind of pea brain thinks having removable memory cards is in any way acceptable in a supposedly secure system?

How difficult can it possibly be to securely collect the answers to a few multiple choice questionnaires cheaply?

It's ridiculous that these "projects" which could be built by a solitary geek in his garage take millions of dollars to create by a company using the latest "technologies" only to find that they fail their most basic task!

If anyone wants to pay me to make a set of e-voting machines + counting in a non-secretive professional manor then I'll happily take on that task!

How hard can it be to make a counter? Even better, a counter which puts out a paper trail for random controls.

Ah well, America isn't a true democracy anyway, so why do I care.

And now watch me while I make a run for my coat.

Actually, the first time the machines were used during the Florida elections, they/politicians/media were actually saying that it was just that, people were going in and not voting. How could machine's set up to do something so simple fail?

But since the elections appear to not actually matter anymore in a too obvious way, here in the land of the free, there would never be a re-run in any state becuase we peasants just aren't patient enough to have to vote again?

Would be nice to see who owns diebold/premier stock, eh? Neither of the major parties ever seem very interested in finding out what's going on except the "odd" ones that can't stop rocking the boat. Soooo annoying, you wish they would just shut up and drink the cool-aid already!

I seem to recall that a government-sponsored committee had a look at e-voting for the UK, and it was agreed that its a bad idea. The leading open-source expert in e-voting software(Jason Kitkat) thinks its a bad idea at

http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.8748

A quote - "Following the elections the influential National Institute of Standards and Technology released a firm report, which said that electronic voting machines 'in practical terms cannot be made secure'."

The Yanks should pay attention to their own experts, rather than the guys who make the machines, & the pols who are in their pockets.

how many of the votes were democrats compared to repblican. i bet there wasnt a single republican missing

"You've got an error that erases itself, which is the worst of all worlds because it can cover itself up."

It's a conspiracy I tell's ya!

Electronic voting means that you can get a result faster, which is viewed by some as an improvement. Personally I feel that it is more important (a) to get to the right result eventually, and (b) to have auditable physical media.

If speed is desired, the best way is paper ballots fed through an electronic scanner / counting device at the polling station, and into a sealed ballot box. Mostly, that'll be accurate enough to give a result acceptable to all parties within minutes of the polling stations closing. On the other hand if it's close, or if corrupt software is alleged, the paper ballots can be recounted both by machine (several times, to determine random error levels), and by hand (to make sure that there is no systematic error / deliberate corruption in the software).

Personally I think that the time-honoured UK approach (counting by hand, with no machinery at all) is the best way to do an election. It's VERY hard for anyone to steal an election when all the evidence is open to scrutiny by all parties (and of course, independant observers).

A subtlety in hand counting that many miss: it is a process of iterative refinement. The first count assembles ballot papers into groups of (say) 100 all for the same candidate. Subsequent counts look for hundred-bundles that actually contain (say) 99 or 101, or contain a paper for the wrong candidate. Each time an error is found, logged and corrected, the result gets more trustworthy. The same cannot be said of any electronic recount, because it starts everything from scratch, and will contain both the same systematic errors, and the same distribution of random ones.

I suppose the fact that the Republitard lost and the Democrap won escaped your attention?

Started out on large paper ballots with an ink marker; switched to punch cards...moved to another area where they had the large "lever-type" machines and then they finally went to the punch cards. after the florida vote fraud with the "chads" (a total bunch of useless willy-wagging) we got the touch-screen machines. They're easy enough to use, but last election i voted for "paper" and used a simple pen to make my choices known.

The punch cards were easy and reliable and I never had a problem with chads or any other nonsense. the last paper ballot was crazy large to cover all the issues and pols running for offices.

Still, it only counts if you can get one set of wankers out of office to get a new set of wankers in now, innit?