Why aren't votes electronic?

[bigshooter]

Wouldn't it be much easier for each person to input their votes electronically at a polling place and having them tallied automatically? Of course there would have to be safeguards, and i don't suggest sending them all to a central collection point. Just take some type of machine that can accept multiple inputs, hook up some monitors and mice and go. Each voting place can then take this data to wherever ballots are currently counted. Absentee votes may still have to be counted, I have no clue how to make that secure, but it would make polling places much quicker, and allow votes to be tallied faster. Any thoughts?

 

[Lorax]

because then we lose the suspense on races like this one

 

[Slugbait]

Plus, we wouldn't be able to put to good use the valuable experience we got filling in circles on our SATs...

 

[3615buck]

And who would develop the software ? Microsoft ???

Ladies and Gentlemen, thanks to the new Microsoft "My presidential election 1.0a", we can tell you, 4 weeks after the elections, that the new president should be... Sh.t ! Blue screen of death !

 

[Slugbait]

<< And who would develop the software ? Microsoft ??? >>

I would say the guys who developed the software for this BBS would do a fine job.

'course, then we'd need to moderate it...

 

[bigshooter]

Hell I could write the software. Make it an html page that writes info to a database. Of course someone would have to put security and encryption into it, but it would not be a gian undertaking. It might cost teh public some, but how much are all the recounts that are going on costing? I am sure it would more than make up for the price. Although I would miss the suspense... oh wait no I wouldn't.

 

[lesterjr]

I voted in TN and I think our ballot was electronic. you pushed a button by who you wanted to vote for and a little red light lit up by their name. When you had everything the way you wanted it, you pushed a big red button at the bottom and you were done.

 

[DARRIN]

Ours was electronic. I think eventually it will be everywhere.

 

[StageLeft]

Yeah hopefully this will happen in the future, and as was mentioned below it would be extremely simple to write

 

[sandorski]

All this fancy gadgetry amuses me. Up here in Canada we use the proven failsafe pencil/paper system. Beside each name is a big circle, put an &quot;x&quot; in the circle by the name you want to vote for, it's simple, it's cheap, it works.

 

[BDawg]

We had touch screens and styli here in NC

Of course for it to work, one of the volunteers had to put his key in. But it was pretty cool.

 

[PG]

It would also be nice if you could go onine and check to see if your vote actually got into the system correctly. We really need a huge database to make sure there's some way to trace the votes if there's a reason to suspect fraud.

 

[Demon-Xanth]

Mainly tracability, you can recount physical items.

 

[IBhacknU]

At least for FL they have a physical ballot to recount. Doing an electronic recount would really be difficult for some to grasp.