The Case for Paper Ballots

The voting machines in Irvine print a paper copy of your electronic ballot before you press "vote." In theory, the paper record would be used to substantiate voters' intentions in the case of fraud allegations. I like it, although who's to say those paper rolls don't get incinerated at just about the same time one of the candidates cries foul. (Around here, it'd be Republicans alleging voter fraud against the local Democrat Party machine, heh.)

But See Glenn Reynolds, at USA Today, "After DNC hack, the case for paper ballots. Are paper ballots really a superior technology to voting machines? Absolutely" (via Instapundit):

Somebody — probably, though not certainly, Vladimir Putin’s intelligence apparatus — has hacked the Democratic Committee’s email servers and released some of what it found via the Wikileaks site.  As Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith notes, this is something new:  Although meddling in foreign elections is old stuff for intelligence agencies (including our own), this sort of email release is unprecedented.

As disruptive as the DNC email release has been, there’s room for something much worse:  A foreign government could hack voting machines, shut down election computers, or delete or alter voter registration information, turning Election Day into a snarled mess and calling the results into question regardless of who wins.

Worse yet, hackers are already working on this.

Voting systems rely on trust. Voters have to trust that their own vote is recorded and counted accurately; they also have to trust that the overall count is accurate, and that only eligible voters are allowed to vote. (When an ineligible voter casts a vote, it cancels out the vote of a legitimate voter every bit as much as if his or her ballot had simply been shredded.)

The problem is that electronic systems — much less the Internet-based systems that some people are talking about moving to — can’t possibly provide that degree of reliability. They’re too easy to hack, and alterations are too easy to conceal. If the powers-that-be can’t protect confidential emails, or government employees’ security information, then they can’t guarantee the sanctity of voting systems...

Boy, that would be a mess. A very nasty mess.

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