The California Secretary of State de-certified most of California’s electronic voting machines, but they were in use throughout San Mateo and Orange Counties.
It’s important to keep in mind that there are two key places in an election where computers play a role. Sometimes the vote itself is cast on an electronic voting machine, as was the case in Orange and San Mateo Counties. The second key role for computers is for counting the votes. All the new paper ballots in California ended up being passed through electronic scanners, connected to computers, which allegedly counted the votes.
Last Tuesday, Georgia found a third key place to insert computers – voter check-in. The results were needless delays, sometimes measured in hours. Who makes these bad Georgia electronic voting check-in machines? Diebold.
There appears to be an emerging consensus about how important it is to use paper ballots instead of electronic voting machines. A change to paper ballots is just the first step. If the votes are counted on machines running secret, proprietary software, the results can’t be trusted.
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