US e-voting proponents say no to paper trails

Celeste Biever writes

The argument centres upon which voting technology is best at simultaneously preventing inaccuracies, fraud, technical glitches and confusion and making voting accessible to the disabled, all without incurring excessive expense. ...

Proponents argue that a paper trail is the most effective way to detect that a computer hacker has changed votes. They also provide redundancy, allowing a re-count if necessary and enabling voters to check their vote. "Paperless voting is hostile," says David Dill, a computer scientist at Stanford University, California, US, who supports the bill [requiring paper backups of electronic voting].

But in a report to be published in Science on Thursday, Ted Selker of the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project, has shown that the newest DREs [for Direct Record Electronic, or "touch screen," voting machines], accompanied by the appropriate training, outperformed all other technologies for accuracy. ...

Opponents of the paper trail also complain that it takes away the privacy and security that e-voting has recently given blind people and Parkinson's sufferers. ...

New Scientist June 22, 2005 17:02