From a Wired News story detailing yet another problem with electronic voting machines
"Somehow the recording software had tabulated it into the wrong race," Haggard says. "Thank goodness for the paper trail. We went to the paper trail and could show how people actually voted."
Haggard doesn't have a clue how the switch could have happened but says that it was either a problem with the ballot definition file that election officials created before the election that tells the machines where to allocate votes or in the voting machine software itself.Once the bogus votes in District 45 were subtracted from the totals, Fiddler lost 51 votes in the race, showing that Tyler had actually won the House seat.
Yes, paper trails are better than nothing, but in my opinion they aren't enough. There is no reason to accept voting technology any less secure than the technology used to process transactions at an ATM. It is the same companies making both technologies. And if the problem is cost, than I see no reason why we should change from paper-based elections at all.
If we cannot be certain that the vote is secure, nothing else in our democratic system matters. It is the bedrock atop which everything else is built.
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