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Comment by MiddleEndian | Hacker News Reader

The real question is "Why?" Manually counting votes is easily verified. What do computers add here? Speed? Who cares? It's not that kind of race.

There are absolutely conflicts of interest involved in voting. I assume anyone who tries to implement computerized voting is malicious, trying to cash in on voting, or both.

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I disagree with a lot of the article, but they do bring up the "hanging chad" debacle. Digital voting helps prevent these cases.

Wouldn't a simple pen/pencil also solve that problem? I mean, over here in the UK we don't use hole punches for voting, we just write a cross in the relevant box.

Seems to work well enough without any sort of voting machine involved.

Problems off the top of my head:

- cross is too light

- shape drawn is not a cross

- more than one cross

- one cross drawn, erased, and redrawn elsewhere

- one cross drawn, crossed off, word "nevermind" written next to it, and then a new cross drawn somewhere else

These are handled by the vote counting humans. There are rules about what counts as s valid marking of the paper. Anything else gets discarded. I don’t see a problem with this.

The hanging chad debacle (along with the weird presidential order) was also an instance of messing with voting "technology." Drawing a line where all candidates are listed in a row is the way to go (for fptp voting of course).

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