Three cheers for Virginia because the Virginia Board of Elections has ordered that electronic, touch-screen voting machines cannot be used in the statewide elections coming up in November.1 Earlier this year, in a demonstration at DEF CON in Las Vegas, a touch-screen voting machine previously used in Virginia was hacked in less than two hours. Instead of touch-screen voting, Virginia will use paper ballots counted by scanning machines in November.
This seems so logical, even before the reports of Russian hacking attempts in last year’s election, that the decision is an obvious one. Touch-screen electronic voting has no paper backup. You touch the screen, your vote is counted, and poof, any evidence of how you voted disappears.2 There is no way to recount the votes. There is no way to know for sure that when you touch Candidate A, your vote wasn’t counted for Candidate B.
Can anybody imagine the problems we would have had last November if some of the states had been as close as Florida in 2000 and there had been credible reports of outside hacking of touch-screen voting machines.
Electronic, touch-screen voting is a risk that we shouldn’t be taking. Paper ballots, scanned right at the polling place, is the way to insure fast and safe election results. Three cheers for Virginia making this decision. Let’s hope all states do the same thing before the elections next year.
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1 Virginia has statewide elections coming up in November: governor, other statewide offices, and the legislature.
2 People have tried to add something like a cash register tape to touchscreen voting machines to provide a backup. But how many people are going to check the tape versus how they voted to see if it is right? And if voters don’t do that, the tape is irrelevant.
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