I Predict Trouble Next Week Because Of Paperles Machines

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There’s trouble coming next week. Regardless of which candidates and parties are said to win next week, there is a problem coming. This is because there is no way to prove to people whether or not the electronic voting machines reported the votes correctly. And this raises the possibility that large numbers of people will not accept the reported election results.
In this highly partisan atmosphere with such high stakes this is a recipe for civil disorder.
If you vote absentee or use a paper ballot, or use a machine that prints your vote on paper and lets you see that it was correctly recorded, you can feel like your vote was correctly counted. But if you vote on a machine that just asks you to trust that it records your vote correctly, and YOUR candidate loses, you’re going to feel like you MIGHT have been cheated. That is human nature.
And even if you know that YOUR vote was correctly recorded, if these machines are in use in your local election, then you are going to feel uneasy about the results.
AND even if your entire district uses safe methods, you are going to feel uneasy about the results from OTHER districts.
So no matter which party is in said to be in the majority after Tuesday, there is no reason for the losers to accept that. (Or the winners, for that matter.)
I don’t see any way around trouble coming out of this.

4 thoughts on “I Predict Trouble Next Week Because Of Paperles Machines”

  2. Right — and we’re going to see Rethugs challenging elections wherever the Dem margin is close. In this climate of partisanship, that is only to be expected. Fears about the machines will be the background noise. Not that there shouldn’t be fears about the machines….
    All the more reason to work to run up better margins for our candidates, less likely to be subject to question.

  4. “…or use a machine that prints your vote on paper and lets you see that it was correctly recorded, you can feel like your vote was correctly counted.”
    Dave, I know you understand a teensy bit about computers because I used to work for you in a computer software company. So why do you say such preposterous crap? I can write a computer program to print ANYTHING on paper. ONLY paper ballots mean anything. ONLY counting paper ballots gives a chance of a fair election. A chance.

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