To Skeptics of Perils of Electronic Voting

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

To the skeptics who do not understand all the worries over touchscreen/
Direct Record Voting or any computerized voting machines.
Skeptics seem to think that the American Public is reacting
to hype and not fact.

Yes, there IS a lot of hype, and there are a lot of stories lacking substance.
There are some folks who are given to the dramatic, and some folks ARE too loose
with exaggerated rhetoric.
There ARE many stories and theories spread around that don't rely on solid
documentation or provable evidence. When such claims fall through, the tendency
might be to write off ALL claims.

Still the fact is that the concerns about electronic voting are real and valid.

The problem IS very serious, and the consequences ARE dire.

The problems with electronic voting are so serious, that 27 states
now require voter verified paper ballots for every voting system.

1. In 2004, there were voting machine malfunctions in every state,
with votes lost, changed, added and subtracted. In North Carolina,
a state that has had electronic voting for years, over 4,400 votes
were lost in one county alone, causing the outcome of one contest
to be unsettled for months. This is just one very blatent failure
of the voting systems.

If the reader has any doubt that electronic voting is risky and insecure, they would
be well advised to review the database of electronic voting failures here:

Problems from 2004 & 2005
http://www.votersunite.org/electionproblems.asp

2. There are problems are with any sort of voting machine, whether it is a DRE or optical scan,but with optical scan, the recovery is much simpler and straightforward, the
election can always be recounted by hand if needed:

Some voting machine companies have worse problems than others, but the
bottom line is that computers fail, and data is corrupted or lost:

See "Mess Ups By Vendor"
http://www.votersunite.org/info/messupsbyvendor.asp

3. Human error is far more devastating when that human error results
in faulty programming or errors in the ballot definitions, causing votes to be
miscounted or lost. As states have switched over to paperless electronic voting,
or to DRES, they have experienced more sweaping and more complex problems
than when using simple paper based voting systems.

See election mess ups by State:
http://www.votersunite.org/info/previousmessups.asp

A very wise man made it clear that there is NO perfect voting system:

"Every voting system (perhaps every system of any kind) is insecure.
Making them more secure is a desirable secondary priority,
but unless we focus everyone on ensuring both auditability and effective auditing,
we're just going to create an impossible muddle." -
Dr. David L. Dill, Founder of Verified Voting Foundation
and professor at Stanford University
www.verifiedvoting.org