Comment on In the age of electronics, when is go to vote can I request a paper ballot instead of a machine?
trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
Depends on where you live. Civilized places still use paper ballots, because electronic ones are practically impossible to get verifiably trustworthy.
I don’t get it isn’t it expensive ?
Say each machine cost $500 to buy and maintain, multiply that by 30 booths and then tens of thousands of polling stations the costs would be massive.
You can just scan the ballots in to get a quick count and then hand count them later.
Elections are expensive anyway. You either need to maintain thousands of computers or print millions of ballots (assuming nation wide elections in most countries). But the main cost is in the organization. You need to rent it places for the polling stations, set up the booths and the whole infrastructure around it. Security and people checking ID’s. Some of this will be done by volunteers in most countries, but that won’t cover all the costs. In the grand scheme of things I don’t thing electronic vs paper voting matters that much to the total cost of the elections.
I didn’t even know electronic voting ballots was a thing. My state only has paper ballots.
It’s easier to falsify a paper election than a properly implemented digital voting system. Keyword being properly.
Elections require trust. A properly designed voting system can be understood by the average voter. That’s impossible with electronic voting.
Nibodhika@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
This is not true at all, it’s much easier to falsify paper votes than it is to falsify any good electronic voting system. This is a fake news perpetuated by people who are finding difficult to falsify electronic voting systems and want to, for example in Brazil the last election held with paper ballots was in 1994, and it has been demonstrated that those results were frauds, one of the elected candidates in that election has been one of the most vocal opposers to electronic voting.
trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Yes it is easier to attack papier voting systems. But these attacks don’t scale. This video by Tom Scott is 6 years old now, but every argument still stands. m.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
mrcleanup@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Yeah, well we aren’t talking about Brazil. My state is all paper. There are multiple audits and there are public observers at every stage. The shit would hit the fan if it was even one ballot off. It’s a super transparent and auditable system.