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this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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In Australia we have a robust and fast paper voting system administered by the Australian Electoral Commission. We get most results in the evening of election day with only really close races being a couple of days out. There is solid chain of custody on paper ballots and having been used for over a century we have all the kinks worked out.
The USA has about 330 million people, we have about 25 million. The voting population of each is smaller, but it is a much larger percetage of our population due to compulsory voting. If we can do it with less than 10% of the population it could be done there with the same ratio no worries, just assume out country was a state and you can see it can work.
Paper is safe and secure. It is well understood and all the hack and hijinks have been worked out. If you ask experts in IT if they think voting should be dine electronically they answer hell no without much debate.
Ditto in the UK 50 million people putting crosses on paper with pens in one day. First results come in about 2 hours after the close of the polls at 10pm, 95% done by the time you wake up the next day. Electronic voting has plenty of downsides and no upsides for anyone other than the people making the voting machines.
Am an IT professional (and also happen to have a degree in politics, i've had a weird life), can confirm.
I am an IT professional, and yep computers should not do election voting
Electronic voting for deciding a conference/meeting venue is fine, but anything involving governance over a large body of people is a strict no-no.
Reason: if other nation states are interested in tampering with the election, they can easily do it with the amount of resources they have. Paper vote is a distributed system which is very hard to tamper AT SCALE.
IT professional:
If I had my way we would all use paper and pen
Germany uses paper ballots. 60 million eligible voters, 3/4 actually voted during the last federal elections.
Am an IT professional (and also happen to have a degree in politics, i've had a weird life), can confirm.