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Electronic Voting and What Should be Done Essay

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There’s been a lot of talk about this new computer system that casts election votes. Ideally, using electronic equipment has many advantages but there are disadvantages hiding in the cave ready to attack. We’ve all seen electronic equipment often work as expected but more importantly, it’s not uncommon for electronic equipment to fail and when this sort of concept is applied to voting, miscounting is simply unacceptable. I think the best way to solve this type problem is to try to make the voting machines work without fail but to never assume it won’t fail. As we’ve seen from the arrogance of the engineers of the Titanic or from the 2004 New York Yankees, just because it looks and sounds workable, we should never assume these machines …show more content…

This may allow voters who don’t believe in electronic equipment or aren’t used to using electronic equipment to take an alternative option. We can discuss how to get an e-voting system to appeal to people all we want, “evangelize” until we’re exhausted but I doubt that most of this would work on stubborn, one-sided people and more importantly, we shouldn’t force people to use something they feel uncomfortable with. Using the bank system as an example, you can withdraw money from an ATM or going to a teller. For example, my grandmother doesn’t use ATMs at all because she doesn’t feel comfortable interacting with electronic equipment. On the voting side, this may or may not be needed because some areas may overwhelmingly prefer paper ballots over electronic voting or vise versa, in this case the polls would have to accommodate.
If electronic voting systems are actually used, it is important that the programming is acceptable and safe. This is why I agree private e-voting organizations should either share the source code with top security departments in the government or have the government regulate how the security department in the organization does business. Ideally, it doesn’t have to be checked by government directly, as long as the private e-voting organization is checked by security professionals of some kind, working outside of the company. This allows some sort of checks and balances so that these companies don’t manufacture poorly secured

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