I'm a geek. For those who know me personally this will be viewed as a drastic under-statement. I work in the IT sector, I run Linux instead of windows, I've been known to debate who was better Picard or Kirk (Picard,) I still have all my old D&D dice, etc etc etc.
Because of this most people are rather shocked that I refuse to use electronic voting machines. Their like a really slow video game, you put an X by someones name, and then wait FOREVER to see who won. The problem is the technology isn't mature enough to trust in one of the most important things we as citizens do for out country.
These machines provide no paper trail for the voter to verify the recorded vote matches their choices or for officials to go back to, so if a recount is ever needed (I'm looking at you Florida) there is no way to do it on these machines. Also in most models of these machines they have no battery backup, so if the power goes out 3/4 of the way through election day, well sorry everyone who voted this morning, we'll catch you next time round.
Additionally these machines appear to be going on sleepovers. They also seem to have some calibration issues but don't worry, it's easy for anyone to recalibrate them.
Lastly, these devices are all closed source, meaning that nobody except those at the company that created them is able to know exactly what is happening in there. I'm not accusing anyone of this, but hypothetically how would you know if the machine you were voting on is counting every vote for a member of party A twice and only once for members of party B not by a bug but because of programming put in at the factory? If the source-code were released every programmer on the planet could look at the code, make sure it was doing what it was supposed to , and possibly suggest fixes for the problems listed above, since the manufacturers can't seem to be bothered.
