3 ms·
Classic counting being what? By hand? Does that sound like the most accurate or efficient way to go about this?
by TheGRS 9y ago
Classic counting being what? By hand? Does that sound like the most accurate or efficient way to go about this?
- throwawayjava 9y agoThis is the key comment of this thread. Assuming perfect security and absence of software bugs, we'd be insane to prefer human counters to machine counters.
- benchaney 9y agoYes, if we assume away all the problems inherent to machine counting it seems like a great solution.
- throwawayjava 9y agoYes. My point was just that there are obvious up-sides... so it's not like e-voting is some pointlessly insane thing. I happen to think it's a bad idea even with dead tree audit trails, but I can respect the position that, with appropriate audit trails, it makes the voting process more robust.
- klondike_ 9y agoNobody expects humans to be accurate, and that's why there are checks and balances in place to make sure the counts are accurate and unbiased. It would take a huge conspiracy to swing an election. Computers represent a single point of failure, one piece of malicious software could affect an election and nobody would even know. This problem is made even worse by the closed source machines in use right now.
- DenisM 9y agoThe manual mistakes will average out with scale. Software mistakes get multiplied.
- TheGRS 9y agoI feel like software mistakes are easily identifiable and fixable where human mistakes are not on both accounts. Plus, even small mistakes could lead to elections being decided on just a few votes the wrong way.
- boomboomsubban 9y agoThe rare truly close race generally faces a recount anyway, so the same mistakes would need to happen multiple times. Unlikely for humans, plausible for machines.
- roywiggins 9y agoEfficiency isn't always a good thing. Efficient systems can be more brittle, more centralized, and with errors that correlate. This is the story of inventing more and more efficient financial products until the whole system collapses due to interdependencies. Sometimes you gain a lot by having deliberate inefficiencies.