voting "machines" eliminate voting [LWN.net]

voting "machines" eliminate voting

Posted Mar 19, 2008 8:25 UTC (Wed) by socket (subscriber, #43)
In reply to: voting "machines" eliminate voting by smoogen
Parent article: Sequoia v. Ed Felten

What?

Are you seriously arguing that having an affordable system is more important than
accountability?  I don't know the numbers on how much it costs to run an election with the
different systems we're talking about, but really... if accountability doesn't matter more
than cost, what's the point of holding the election?  Let's just skip the election and just
give the presidency to whichever candidate is more popular with the supreme court.  That *has*
to be more affordable, and therefore better than actually bothering to count votes.

Oh, wait.  Somehow, I get the feeling that this could be a really, really bad idea.

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voting "machines" eliminate voting

Posted Mar 19, 2008 14:51 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

I am not arguing that affordable is better than accountability.. I am arguing that it is
usually considered more important by people. People as a group are usually short-sighted and
end up with not thinking things through. So when they see they have to hire more people to run
an election or get some roads repaired, or raise taxes.. they will go with the roads getting
repaired. If they have the choice between hiring more people for an election or a bright
shiney gadget that will solve their problems and they dont have to stop road repairs or raise
taxes.. they will go for the gadget (because don't gadgets always make life easier?)

And only when it turns out that they made a bad decision, they will hem and haw for a couple
more elections until some better gadget comes out.. because we humans are built not to
recognize we bought a lemon.

voting "machines" eliminate voting

Posted Mar 22, 2008 2:39 UTC (Sat) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link]

If something is not affordable, it won't happen. In a count of hands, you can do a recount
easily. A vote of the populace is rarely a complete recount, because it's too expensive to. If
the equivalent of recounting the paper ballots is cheap, it may be standard practice for every
ballot; if it's too expensive, it will only occur when a smoking gun appears. That's reality.