Voting machine

From Freepedia

A voting machine is a device to record and register votes to be counted as per any voting system, with or without printing a ballot for the voter to verify.

Some view it as an even more secure improvement on a secret ballot and the manual systems of human vote counters and scrutineers. Spoiled ballots and overvoting are eliminated, undervoting is greatly reduced, and voting by the disabled becomes much easier, and can be done in private without assistance.

However, in part because for political privacy votes cannot be revealed as cast, and in part because of the increasingly complex technology involved, it is subject to various vulnerabilities and compromises of design. Historically there are many incidents of voting machine compromise. As with a slot machine there is very high motivation to meddle with the numbers.

Some people think that whenever votes are recorded in a medium which is invisible to humans, electors lose any possibility to verify how their votes are collected and tallied up to produce the final result, thus they need to have an absolute faith in the accuracy, honesty and security of the whole electoral apparatus. This is said to be particularly true for electronic elections, because for people who didn’t program them, computers act just like black boxes and their operations can truly be verified only by knowing the input and comparing the expected output with the actual output [1], but under a secret ballot system, there is no known input, nor is there any expected output with which to compare electoral results [2].

The integrity and legitimacy of electronic voting rests totally on the reliability of software for voting. Proposals for Open Source voting software have been gaining ground as proprietary closed-source software is not auditable for manipulation attempts by the software provider or its employees and is revealed more and more to be buggy.

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Image:Vote stub.png  This election-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
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