Political

Voting machines: a warning from the US with the candidate who got zero votes

There have been lots of tales from America about problems with electronic voting machines in the mid-term elections, but my favourite example is this one – where a candidate was recorded as getting zero votes even though he’d gone and voted for himself.

Why electronic voting is still a bad idea: Tom Scott

Tom Scott nicely summarises the powerful arguments against electronic voting for public elections, and given his own expertise also makes the point that the problems with electronic voting look worse the more you really know about how computers and security really work. more

Two things are common across many of the stories – the absence of a proper paper-based audit trail to check things if the machine comes up with a suspicious result and the reluctance on the part of officials running elections to believe their machines may have got it wrong.

They are both important factors to look out for if your local council in the UK is thinking of trying a voting pilot using machines for next May (and indeed to look out for in Scotland with its electronic counting – not quite the same as electronic voting, but also important to get right – coming with STV).

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