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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.

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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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