Do you trust electronic voting machines?

Answer 1

NO NO NO NO NO

ok let me say this

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

AND

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

PS NO!!!!!!!!!!

Answer 2

No!

Put a computer in a voting machine and you are inviting fraud in the front door. Someone will find a way to cheat. I don't see wide scale voter fraud as a problem but I do think it can be done on a small level.

These old voting machines are 100 percent cheat proof. Why give them up?

http://www.vahistorical.org/sva2003/vote.htm

I say fire up the old assembly line and make more of these beauties. Isn't it important that our vote count?

The old machines almost never screw up (not to mention last 50 years/ what computer can say that?). These new fancy electronic machines will not last ten. Janet Reno very likely lost the Democrat nomination for Governor of Fla. because of these error-prone contraptions. And the courts don't care how wrong a vote is as long as there was no fraud involved --as if a accurate count of votes cast is a trivial matter.

A voting machine is never something you should ever have to plug into a wall -- Ever.

Not all new tech is Superior to the old fashioned way of doing things.

I am a proud conservative Republican by the way. Bush Won Florida fair and square. Don't put me in the box of staying Bush stole the election. He didn't and then Sec of the State (now congresswoman and Senate candidate) Kathy Harris followed the law as written and so did the Supreme Court.

Answer 3

I trust certain ones. Specifically, any machine that prints out a receipt or requires that there be a physical record of the vote on paper, I trust. If there are paper votes, people can confirm that their vote was counted by the machine as they wanted it to be, and if there's a recount needed people can do it by hand and compare it to what the computer has. Also, if there's some electrical emergency, even if the electronic votes are lost the paper records remain.

In MA we have a voting process where you mark on a sheet of paper what your vote is and feed it into a scantron. I think it's a good system because it makes counting easier, but not at the expense of security. I would also trust a machine that printed a paper receipt for you to bring to a pol worker or slip in a box after checking for errors. Anything that doesn't make a paper copy I distrust: if I, working in an office, can't deposit any check for my company without 2 paper copies and a form to fill out in addition to computer records, than all votes should be backed up the same way.

Answer 4

Suppose your bank announced to one day that they were no longer sending you statements - and that there was no longer any way for an independent audit of your account to be done - that you had to simply trust them - and if you disagreed with what they said was in your account, too bad.

How long would you stay with that bank?

Why put up with voting machines that are doing this to our elections?

Computers are only servants, they have no intrinsic reliablility or trustworthiness. Has your computer ever had a virus or spyware infection? It is trivial for a hacker to exploit these simple servants, and make them loyal to a new master.

Does anyone doubt that this is possible, or that a hundred special interests and foreign governments are not now, at this very moment plotting how to exploit this new weakness in our election system?

To imagine that this is simple partisan sour grapes is short-sighted, as the machines, if not extremely well-designed (and they are not), can be made to serve anyone.

How could anyone be against transparent, accurate, and verifiable elections? What are the motives of those that do not want this?

Answer 5

Only as far as I could throw one.

There's no reason they should be unreliable, unless they are deliberately designed to skew results or provide other 'propietary' benefits.

Data standards define ATM transactions, orders, invoices and payment transactions with trace numbers, recreateability and all the features needed for everyone to put good faith reliance on them. That electronic voting machines have been specifically engineered to excise each of these features only means that tampering was intended from the outset.

And that's not just an opinion, either.

Answer 6

After the 2000 election...no. I can't believe in day and age, we don't having more trustworthy voting machines! We can clone human beings, but we can't create a machine that can keep up with votes....amazing!

Answer 7

Yes, I trust them and they're easy to use.

Why not trust them, they're the same as other electronic equipment you use every day.'

Answer 8

Yes. It's the people who mess with them that I don't trust.

Answer 9

There isn't much in our world you can put any degree of implicit trust in so, you do the best you can under the circumstances. I don't even trust myself! It helps to keep me honest.

Answer 10

I trust them more than I trust old people to use punch card ballots.

Answer 11

No, you want to talk about being able to rig the voting.....