Electronic Voting Systems should be banned. Voting on paper is the only way!
Many countries in the world have various forms of electronic voting systems. There is one thing security experts agree on: No electronic voting system in existence is guaranteed to be secure.
On the contrary, in most electronic systems serious flaws have been discovered, and the systems are vulnerable to attack, and vote rigging in numerous ways. Very little action is taken to improve this.
The best voting system would be pen and paper balotting. Some countries, like The Netherlands where I live, have thrashed electronic systems in favor of paper voting bills and manual counting. For a country of 17 million people it takes about 1 day for results to be available.
The only advantage of an electronic system is that results can be available sooner. But you give up the opportunity to reliably check whether the results have been tampered with.
With the upcoming mid-term elections in the US several very worrying reports on compromised systems and software have come to light. Little to no action has been taken to alleviate these. Some examples:
Very important topic!! This should be part of the resist movement in the US. Its amazing the freedoms technology brings to humanity. Freedoms never intended…
The United States has a long history of denying the vote to whole groups of people— especially women, people of color, and the poor. Poll taxes, literacy exams, and property deeds have been replaced by voter-I.D. laws, polling-place closures, and state-sanctioned efforts to curtail voter registration. Most recently, this has been a Republican strategy to grab and hold on to power, one best explained by the conservative operative Paul Weyrich when he was plotting Ronald Reagan’s path to victory, in 1980: “I don’t want everybody to vote . . . our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
What we’re seeing now, as that strategy comes to fruition, and entrenched social and economic inequalities undermine the ability of whole swaths of citizens to cast a ballot, is a concerted effort to make sure that our election system does not work for everyone. Voting machines that flip votes don’t need to be hacked by a malicious foreign actor to undermine public confidence in the integrity of our democracy. That’s being done for Americans, by Americans.
