this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2024
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I'm honestly not convinced voting machines are a good idea, especially proprietary ones. You are asking everyone to blindly trust the intentions of the company making them. You also risk bugs and hacks.
Public elections need to be transparent, and easy to oversee, voting machines makes that much harder.
Theoretically, a voting machine could be open source, tracable, verifiable, and well regulated.
In practice, all your currently existing industries can only make black boxes that even the makers can't guarantee the workings of.
One problem that remains even with your theoretical machine is that non technical people are left behind in the verification process. It can be argued that a voting and verification method that is opaque to quite a significant part of the population is undemocratic.
True, a fully transparent system would require every voter to understand the machine and how the systems prevent tampering.
At the same time, I don't think even a majority of voters know how the voting process works in the U.S. and Canada today, simply trusting that such a process exists. I'd argue that many of the processes aren't even fair, with gerrymandering and spoiler effects being common. Large numbers of people even believe that mail-in votes are simply a tool for fraud.
So yes, ideally everyone would fully understand every step of every system of the voting process, but a working system is possible without that. If a more opaque system could increase verifiability and/or allow faster easier voting, it might be worth it. Of course currently existing voting machines do neither, and massively increase opacity at every level, so they're quite terrible, but I don't think they need to be perfect to be useful.