No transparency = no confidence
"Chief Inspector Lars Henriksson from the National Bureau of Investigation swept the board with his speedy censorship of "bad stuff" on the internet with little or no regard for facts and the attitude of "never mind the innocents as long as we grab some guilty ones"."
Boy does that sound familiar.
It's the disease you know, it spreads. See how the attack on free speech is being spread across Europe. When one of them gets away with it, the more timid one's feel emboldened.
Now the need to make elections transparent and verifiable is being eliminated by self serving or naive politicians.
When the next election comes, I'm expecting to see a Jacqui Smith minuscule 2000 vote margin wiped out and her out of power. Good riddance to bad rubbish. If I don't see that, I'd want to see and check and be confident in the vote. If I don't see that I want to have confidence in the election process. If I don't have that, you are not an elected representative, she is a usurper of power, an enemy of democracy without legitimate power.
Which is why the democracy requires the vote be verifiable, verified, and transparent. Without a voter verified paper trail, the voter cannot know that their vote in the machine matches the vote that they intended to make.
Why is it even a discussion point? Why did any politician ever put in place a system that could not be verified? What were their motives in removing the verifiability of the vote?