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Essentially, the entire voting system has been working on computers for a very long time, right?

So what's the big complaint about the Diebold machines?


The complaint goes something like this. Indeed, once the ballot is scanned, it's all computers after that. However, in the event that the scanner had some kind of malfunction, you still have the original paper to go back to. This allows you to rescan it, or even count it by hand. You can go back to a paper record that the voter held in their hands and take a completely independent, perhaps higher cost for higher accuracy, path toward getting the votes tallied. The existence of that independent path lowers the absolute requirement on the correctness of the primary path. When you go with an all-electronic system (from Diebold or anybody else), then you give up on that independent path.

Incidentally, Bitt, no receipt for you. If you had a receipt, then you'd be able to use it to prove to a third-party how you voted, thus enabling bribery or coercion. However, you raise a good question about when you're supposed to do a recount. In California, they have a mandatory recount of 1% of the paper ballots to make sure they're statistically the same as the primary election results. If the test recount fails, then you have to recount everything.