Before You Run to The Polls: Grab Paper and Pencil

South Carolina's Republican presidential primary last weekend raised new concerns. In Horry County, which includes Myrtle Beach, election workers were unable to get about 80 percent of the touch-screen machines running on time. Many voters had to use emergency paper ballots. And some were told to come back later when the paper ballots ran out.From comments posted - 1. Size of Conspiracy:Paper balloting systems, whether optical scanner or hand-counted, always require a much larger conspiracy (in terms of headcount) in order to skew an election. Larger numbers of people involved means greater chance of discovering the fraud, while with electronic voting systems there a numerous ways to manipulate the final count (or change the votes as they are entered) and it really only takes one person to affect hundreds, even thousands of votes in a single district. And that same person can affect multiple districts during an election.2. Auditing Capability and Veracity of Count:Paper balloting systems, by definition, leave a PAPER TRAIL. Auditing the count is therefore possible. Even if you STEAL a ballot box, then you know a ballot box is missing and that should indicate something right there. However, with electronic voting systems, the manipulation is harder to catch, since the counts can be manipulated before (by tweaking the IP-protected code that the private corporate owner won't let you see), during by introducing additional code on the fly through various means (those technicians that get called in so often --why do the machines "break down" so often anyway? My TI calculator never generates an error.), or after by manipulating the software used for final tabulation and for generating counts after the fact. Some electronic systems generate receipt-like paper trails as the voting occurs, but even that doesn't prevent the "before" and "during" manipulation that is possible and strongly suggested by the widespread reports during the last several elections of "I voted for X and I watched it log a vote for Y."The people that mewl, "But election fraud is nothing new! You can steal paper balloted elections too!" are just using a really weak argument of redirection... the fact that electronic voting makes it EASIER and LESS DETECTABLE, thus LESS RELIABLE than paper balloting remains.People that argue for electronic voting _as_it_stands_now_ are arguing for more election fraud. Ignore them or refute them, but do not be confused by them.

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