November 4th, 2006

Your Vote May Not Count

Paper ballots leave better audit trails and allow for recounts

by Jared Prescott
 
If you are provided the option of computer or paper ballot this coming Tuesday, always insist on a paper ballot if you want your vote to count. Unless you deposit a printout where you can verify your selections, how do you expect anybody else will be able to examine your ballot and perform a recount if necessary? I do love computers and all that they can do, but being trusted to blindly accept our votes without leaving a paper trail is simply unacceptable.

How on earth did we get to a place where we are forced to accept the proposed outcome of an election to computers that cannot provide certifiable results of the outcomes? The current system provides no room for errors that are certain to happen. Machines will fail, electricity will go out, electrons will bounce about unpredictably at inopportune moments, software will be flawed, and some people will cheat. Without paper trails, there is no way to reasonably reconstruct the intended results of voters.

My biggest fear in the upcoming election is that there will be charges aplenty of fraud, corruption, and stolen elections. Who can contest the outcome of an election where there is no proof that results may vary from the printout on a computer screen? Those are things you might want to give serious consideration to before drinking the party koolaid and blindly trusting and accepting the notion that computer results will provide 100% accuracy. The fact is -- they don’t. The outcomes are only as reliable and trustworthy as the person behind the keyboard. Then there’s the matter of the reliability of the hardware ... and here’s hoping that the software programmers are honorable and that their code is 100% accurate.

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