Pros And Cons Of Paperless Electronic Voting Machines

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In order to decide who runs a country, there are many steps that have to be taken. While it is important to have an electoral process in place, a constant struggle among voters, officials, and voting experts is trying to figure out which voting methods should be used in the United States. For example, not everyone agrees with using paperless (DRE) direct recording electronic voting machines for the electoral process. The idea of using those machines raises suspicion and trust issues among some voters because “There is no way to tell whether the votes recorded by DRE machines match those selected by the voters” (Dill and Castro 29). Furthermore, past research shows evidence of DRE machines being vulnerable to hackers as well as creating longer …show more content…

Should Ban Paperless Electronic Voting Machines", believe otherwise. They warn people that this type of thinking “is based on the mistaken idea that we can build computers that can be trusted to carry out operations whose results cannot be independently verified” but this is an almost impossible task because “There is no way to know whether any of the many people involved in the design, implementation, and manufacture of the machines made a mistake or introduced a malicious change” (Dill and Castro 29). With so many things left unknown they not only claim that these paperless machines should not be trusted, they should be banned. Most concerns with DRE machines boil down to one issue which is not providing a paper trail. For example, voters who are against electronic voting but live in certain states which solely use these machines, may have raised suspicions with accuracy because “paperless DREs have no independent verification. If votes are changed in a plausible way, how will anyone ever know” (Dill and Castro 29). If results from one of these state elections came into question, there would be no way audit them. Furthermore, many people believe that with almost any electronic comes the possibility of it being hacked. That alone is enough to put the fear in some voters that certain voting methods such as DRE voting systems can be manipulated to work in favor of one party or the other. Once people begin thinking this way, it can become a huge problem as Lemos would agree when he describes the “truth about elections: They are only as good as the citizens' confidence in them” (11.1). In addition, David Lindley in "Ghosts in the machine: electronic voting machines were supposed to vanquish unreliable counts. They did not--but David Lindley finds that other technologies present their own problems", discusses

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