I’m probably in a liberal minority on voting machines in that I think they’re both a necessary and an inevitable step forward. Pen and paper ballots are prone to massive error - partially filled, wrongly filled, hanging chads, weird scribbles,… Manual counting is even worse - we know today that human eyeballs are among the worst evidence-gathering mechanisms…
What I think is needed is a simple, open-source and open-hardware voting machine, which is verified with open procedures before voting and then locked away physically. That last step is critically important - we all know that physical security is 9/10ths of security. Also, a verified multiply redundant recording system (that’s NOT a goddamn Access DB) - optical drives or EEPROMS maybe?
Multiple counting systems run by separate observers (in India, each candidate in the election gets to appoint observers during voting and counting) completes the whole thing.
Oh, and there’s absolutely no freakin’ need to complicate the thing with WiFi and touchscreens - buttons, LED displays and wires are perfectly capable of ease of use.
