I'm not quite following why you left this comment, when the photograph on the article is of a woman in Michigan literally depositing a paper ballot. The machines discussed are for tabulating paper ballots.
And why are we using machines for tabulating? The number of people available to count ballots scales linearly with the number of votes cast generally...
> The number of people available to count ballots scales linearly with the number of votes cast generally...
Yes, but the amount of work in tabulating with humans, if you have a time bound, scales superlinearly; as you scale out the number of people tabulating initially beyond one, you add coordination overhead, which is superlinear with the number of people coordinated.
Only slightly. Other countries manage to get results the same night as the election despite hand counting. Even with an extra level of management to handle 300m instead of 30m, you would still get it all done in the same time.
What about machine tabulating first and then hand count afterwards as a check? Alternatively any party can ask for a manual recount of individual districts?
> Bernhard, who is an expert witness for election integrity activists in a lawsuit filed in Georgia to force officials to get rid of paperless voting machines used in that state
Because not so long ago, all the tech luminaries were asking "why are you still using paper ballots that take hours to count and are prone to error (both on the part of the voter and the counter)?"
Might have even been as recently as the "hanging chad" debacle in the Bush/Gore recount.
That was never my experience. For example see http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/risks.html for a warning about the insecurity of voting machines before the Bush/Gore recount happened. And even then it was old hat among the knowledgeable. For example there was the Nebraska senatorial election that Chuck Hagel stole in 1996. (He resigned as CEO of ES&S in 1995, and won by a wide margin in 1996 in an election counted by ES&S machines despite being behind by an even wider margin in the polls. The machines did not allow a recount. What do YOU think happened?)
Were lots of people singing about the future? Of course. But lots knew that "put it on a computer" isn't a recipe for accuracy when the people who make the computers have a vested interest in the outcome!
The various Pirate parties that are around are, as far as I know, universally against electronic voting.
So some politicians are against it. And if the most digitally clued-in politicians say it's a shit idea, but the incumbent digitally challenged politicians think it's great, I know who you should trust in the matter.
