A USAToday Editorial, and an opposing view: Editorial: Electronic voting is the real threat to elections <read>
Imagine how easy voting would be if Americans could cast ballots the same way they buy songs from iTunes or punch in a PIN code to check out at the grocery store: You could click on a candidate from a home computer or use a touch screen device at the local polling place.
It’s not entirely a fantasy. In many states, some voters can already do both. The process is seductively simple, but it’s also shockingly vulnerable to problems from software failure to malicious hacking. While state lawmakers burn enormous energy in a partisan fight over in-person vote fraud, which is virtually nonexistent, they’re largely ignoring far likelier ways votes can be lost, stolen or changed.
How? Sometimes, technology or the humans running it simply fail
The article goes on to list some of the failures of electronic voting, many of which have been covered at CTVotersCount.
Fortunately our Legislature has not wasted time on raising Connecticut’s adequate voter I.D. law to the level of voter suppression. Unfortunately, the Legislature has continued to ignore science, experience, and the Constitutional requirement for preserving the secret vote – this spring they voted for email voting, in a provision inserted in a unrelated bill, without public hearings, Governor vetoes bill with email/fax voting “rat”
The opposing view from Bob Carey, Opposing view: Paper voting system is broken <read>
Carey is not a scientist. For years he has been advocating for more effective military voting, he knows much progress has been made to make paper voting effective for military and overseas voters, and that the military has been negligent in following the law to provide an officer to assist military votes at each base. He should also know how vulnerable even the defense department networks remain. And local control of elections requires using the regular internet for voting, managed by officials, largely no more technical than Mr. Carey.
