Remote Voting--Who's Counting?

     And so, said Mary Ann, our voting system is out of control. It is even difficult to audit a vote. Manual audits are necessary, said Simons—the closer the vote count, the greater the audit must be.

      What questions must we ask? To be sure, how easy is a system to audit? An optical scanner is far easier to audit than a voter-verifiable paper trail. But any sort of remote voting is insecure, she continued. We are moving in the right direction, slowly.

      Paperless voting is on its way out. Both precinct- and central-based optical scanners are preferable to it.

      Why try to fix a system that isn’t broken? Gentry Lange had asked. His question might actually apply to SCOTUS, the recent victory of Indiana’s stringent law that requires picture i.d.s of voters, at the Supreme Court level. In other words, since Indiana can’t produce evidence of one instance of voter fraud, what’s it all about, anyway? Why is it a consideration at all? And yet experts predict that such legislation, which already exists in other states, will spread even farther.

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