There simply are no valid arguments for voting machines. Speed is irrelevant, there's no reason why tallying the votes desperately needs to take a few hours le

There simply are no valid arguments for voting machines. Speed is irrelevant, there's no reason why tallying the votes desperately needs to take a few hours less. There are only two motives for voting machines: commercial interests and the desire to obscure the voting process. Neither of these should be trusted with foundations of the democratic vote. On the latter subject: because the transparency of the voting process is so fundamental to democracy, most countries had laws in place that first needed to be scrapped or mutilated to allow voting machines in the first place. The people who wrote these laws were neither stupid nor Luddites. Ironically, we've always send observers to third world countries and former dictatorships to judge whether their elections are truly free and democratic, using criteria that would never allow for voting machines to obfuscate the process. For starter, it would make such neutral observation pointless. I'm lucky I live in country (Netherlands) that has abolished voting machines years ago. (After a campaign against them led by by old school hackers.) (There's one movement in the Netherlands that openly advocates a return to voting machines. This movement is lead by Dutch mayors. The Netherlands is rather unique in the fact that mayors are not elected but appointed by political manoeuvring, which has been subject of debate for a long time. I do not believe these things to be a coincidence.)