[LINK] Electronic Voting

[Stewart Fist]

1. Actually the main argument against electronic or machine voting is that
it costs the voters too much time.

I've never seen a queue at an Australian voting booth more than, say, 50
people in length, and I've never stood in line for more than a few minutes
in the last 50 years.

The difference between this and the US system, is because of the cost of
voting machines -- and the fact that they are only used one day every two
years -- and the fact that machines break down and require highly paid
specialist technicians, while broken pencils only need a pencil sharpener --
and machines that are idle for two years deteriorate and require specialist
maintenance.  No business in its right mind would spend this amount of money
on a machine used for such a brief working life.

1a ... A subset of this argument, is that when booth costs are low, you can
afford to have many more of them, so voting booths can be placed in more
convenient locations.
 
1b... And a subset of this argument is, that each booth can have many more
voting carrels, so the throughput is much higher.


2. The second major reason why not to use machines, is that they are
inflexible.  I've been active on an American forum discussing voting
systems, and the main argument that American activists mount against the
idea of preferential voting, is that they would need to spend billions to
replace/reprogram their machines.

2a ... so a Subset of this argument, is that Nader as a third candidate,
destroyed the idea of majority voting for President.  Blame it on the
machines.  

2b ... a Subset of this argument is that if the USA was to introduce
Preferential voting, they'd also then need to spend billions more educating
their citizens in the complexities of non-binary numbering.



3. The third major reason is that some people are daunted by strange
mechanical devices, while few are pencil-phobic.

3a ... the subset of this argument, is that people need to trust the
electoral system for democracy to work, and from experience, people know
that they can't trust machines.