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Dutch Voting Machines De-Certified
Peer writes "The Dutch government has officially decided that it will no longer use voting machines (Babel Fish Translation) for elections. So it's pencil and paper from now on. Activists have been campaigning against the use of voting machines for some time."
Will there ever be a day when electronic voting will be viewed with the same or greater level of credibility as paper voting?
Frankly, the only reason I can think of someone wanting the illiterate to vote is if they are planning on tricking them into voting as part of their hoard.
having them vote may be democratic, but having the uninformed vote is not good for democracy, and its really hard to be sure you're informed if you can't check sources (ie, read).
We count votes by hand here in Canada, and I haven't noticed any speed problems. It's so fast they created a law so that the results from the east coast couldn't be released until the polls on the west coast closed, because they thought releasing the results influence the west coast results. It shouldn't be hard to find enough volunteers to get the counting done within a couple of hours for each polling station. Maybe you have too many people going to each polling station. There's only 352 votes per polling station, so counting that many ballots shouldn't take too long.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The illiterate should not have the vote.
Seriously, if someone does not have the intellectual capacity to read a ballot, how can they be considered to have the intellectual capacity to vote in an informed manner? If a significant portion of a nation's citizenry has not mastered this simple pre-requisite skill for the maintenance of a civilized society for any reason, then they (as a group) can not be trusted to make any other decision that would not be damaging to their own civilization.
I'll entertain arguments that those who are physically incapable (blindness for example) should be allowed the vote, but not for those who are mentally incapable. Yes, I recognize that some educational systems produce illiterates in great numbers. That is a problem with the educational system and the democratic government(totalitarian states do not count - we are talking about elections after all) that permits it.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
Not to mention the fact that counting votes manually really doesn't take that long, at least in Sweden. The preliminary count of party-votes (done on a district level) is usually finished by the end of election night. The ballots are then shipped to county election offices where they will be counted again, including counting person-votes and write-ins (this process can take more than a week).
Your problem, not ours, and entirely self-inflicted. The size of U.S. ballots is the problem. How the votes are tallied is beside the point.
In the last Federal election I was the first person to vote in my area (on my way to work), so I was the one who looked in the ballot box, certified to the Returning Officer that it was empty, and taped it shut. How much more democracy do you want?
In our last provincial election we also had a referendum on adopting a single-transferrable vote system for our elections. I voted yes, but not enough people did, and the referendum failed. We would have stuck with paper ballots (a paper trail is non-negotiable, IMHO), but most versions of STV require computers to tabulate the results in a timely manner.
...laura, proudly Canadian
It is all part of their "I want it now." culture. Not to mention that on voting day they have to vote for everything from President (which they don't actually vote for) right down to the lowest municipale office of dog catcher in some places.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo