Just because there's a lot of stuff coming out about Diebold, don't assume the other voting machines are OK. There have been problems with all brands of voting machine, so I'd tend to assume they're all designed poorly. Diebold is just the Kleenex of e-voting. If someone found that blowing your nose on paper products caused nasal cancer, that wouldn't mean other brands of facial tissues were necessarily safe. You might want to test the other brands too, and get used to washing handkerchiefs.
If hand-counted paper ballots are good enough for Canada, Australia, Germany, and a bunch of other first-world countries, why do we need the complications added by computerizing our elections?
Even if we had the most bullet-proof open source software and the machines were designed properly, the logistics and economics of computerized voting don't make sense. We don't have trained computer technicians running our polls--we have volunteers whose average age (I've heard) is 70. Yet we expect them to do troubleshooting on equipment they've probably seen once before at poll worker training, in the middle of a hectic election. We're spending millions, billions of dollars on equipment that is only used once or twice a year. For the cost of the annual maintenance agreements alone, I'm sure we could pay a lot of people to count votes for a day or two. (For reference, my county just paid $10,000 apiece for 80 eSlates.) If someone suggested we spend that kind of money on armored cars to deliver materials to polling places, everyone would scream what a waste it would be when they're only used once a year--and then we have to store them somewhere the rest of the time.
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If hand-counted paper ballots are good enough for Canada, Australia, Germany, and a bunch of other first-world countries, why do we need the complications added by computerizing our elections?
Even if we had the most bullet-proof open source software and the machines were designed properly, the logistics and economics of computerized voting don't make sense. We don't have trained computer technicians running our polls--we have volunteers whose average age (I've heard) is 70. Yet we expect them to do troubleshooting on equipment they've probably seen once before at poll worker training, in the middle of a hectic election. We're spending millions, billions of dollars on equipment that is only used once or twice a year. For the cost of the annual maintenance agreements alone, I'm sure we could pay a lot of people to count votes for a day or two. (For reference, my county just paid $10,000 apiece for 80 eSlates.) If someone suggested we spend that kind of money on armored cars to deliver materials to polling places, everyone would scream what a waste it would be when they're only used once a year--and then we have to store them somewhere the rest of the time.