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Voting: Low-Tech Is the Answer
There are three reasons why all-electronic voting machines are a bad idea: Transparency, recovery, and audit

On Nov. 7, more Americans will vote on electronic voting machines than ever before. No fewer than 39% of voters will cast their ballots electronically. Many of these votes will be cast on machines without any paper record. The votes will be fully electronic. As a computer science professor, and as someone who has been studying electronic voting for years, I am nervous.

Don't get me wrong; I love computers and electronics. I am one of those early adopters who buys the latest gadget before all the kinks have been worked out. And that is one of the reasons why I think electronic voting is a bad idea. Any system adopted too quickly is going to have kinks. We should not use the public as the beta testers of new voting systems.

If wringing the bugs out of the systems were my main concern, I would be optimistic about the future of electronic voting. After all, eventually we could produce a stable system. Unfortunately, there are three problems with electronic voting that have nothing to do with whether or not the system works as intended. They are transparency, recovery, and audit.

Easily Understood A system is transparent if its users easily understand its operation. In the case of voting machines, the users are the voters, the election officials, the candidates, and the poll workers. Basically, everybody.

Producing anything that is easily understood by everybody is enough of a challenge. The last things we need are opaque boxes full of silicon and electrons mysteriously computing functions and outputting the election results. I have a Ph.D. in computer science, and I can't look at a computer and tell if it is counting votes correctly.

Electronic voting is not transparent—it is not even translucent. There is no way to observe the counting of the votes publicly, and you can't even tell if the votes are being recorded correctly. Anyone inclined toward suspicion or conspiracy theory will believe that this type of technology validates his/her fears.