Why Are We Still Using Voting Machines?
Voting machines. What do they do anyway? Is discussing this matter a political statement? Voting machines are favoured by most political parties, as anyone questioning the need for these would likely be ridiculed or labeled some bad word.
Voting machines. So much stuff can - and sometimes does - go wrong. Voting machines are not a religion, are they? In his latest book (that I still read), Schneier discusses the history of voting, however he seems to be obsessing too much over slop, not whether we need any technology at all to collect and count votes? Observers and a form of "peer review" have served humanity for many years - centuries even - with redundancy at many levels to counter mischief (many ballots, many observers, independent counts).
I'm not an antagonist of tech, but why on Earth are people trying to slap a computer at everything? This past Sunday I saw in a flea market a component of a so-called 'smart' meter. I didn't recognise what that was (I never had one). Do we really need a meter that measures things like when you use what, how many people are home, and all sorts of other things? Who is best served by such "tech" (data collection)? The same old (physical) meter works just fine and serves no data about us (other than the current consumption, as revealed every time someone comes indoors to take a reading and at no other time).
Voting machines still seem to me like an infantile cargo cult and an act of salesmanship (like various security theatre rituals at airports). I still vote with pencil and paper; it's simple, cheaper, and it works (almost nobody disputes the results here).