Electronic Voting goes to Court

The court challenge of Diebold sounds a little ridiculous, from the initial cut of the story. Given that it’s really easy to turn this kind of story either direction with the inclusion or exclusion of a small amount of fact, but it barely touches the much larger fundamental issue of electronic voting: Can we really count on it?

It really comes down to the question of how much corruption we believe is present in the current, non-electronic system. At the moment, large-scale shifts in voting results require a whole chain of involvement at multiple levels of the voting tree. Electronic voting presents the potential for a much smaller intrusion to affect huge numbers of votes, although the security ostensibly in place is supposed to be that much more stringent. I tend to be more optimistic than pessimistic, so I think the old physical way, while less efficient, was actually more efficient at stemming corruption. A new paradigm in voting technology requires a companion shift in voting integrity oversight, with the emphasis perhaps more focused on process and electronic security, and less on the physical integrity of the voting boxes and locations.