States ditch voting machines in favor of wasteful paper alternative because there is 'no money' to r - Polidicks

[QUOTE=Elecbullet;46392983]"we do bad thing a lot so reducing bad thing doesn't help"[/QUOTE] trying to use a spoon to bail water out of a sinking ship is a good analogy here. you should look elsewhere to save on paper. elections are extremely important and voting machines have questionable accuracy. [editline]2nd November 2014[/editline] not to mention manufacturing millions of these machines has to have some huge carbon footprint impact [editline]2nd November 2014[/editline] machines that will get used like once a year.

[QUOTE=Elecbullet;46392983]"we do bad thing a lot so reducing bad thing doesn't help"[/QUOTE] I can guarantee you that with all the companies in America, they easily triple the amount of paper that would be used in the voting, in a day alone.

[QUOTE=darunner;46393325]Actually, that makes it MORE likely to be secure, because few people will have the know-how and tools to crack such an old piece of equipment. Some government agencies still use floppy disk for data transmittal, because it's the most secure option available.[/QUOTE] that's not it at all. it's because "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." these government agencies don't bother to replace their existing hardware because new hardware gives only a few benefits for the immense cost it entails.

You can have a complete cost-benefit environmental analysis of voting machines versus paper voting, and I don't know which you will find to be more environmentally friendly. But what the poster said that I objected to was just stupid.

[QUOTE=Antdawg;46393939]Wouldn't it be less secure because as its been around for longer there's a chance that more people would have studied it and to a higher degree? Not to forget that older systems are generally not as complicated (eg less built-in security) than newer systems. And I thought floppy disks were still used not because of security reasons but because it would otherwise be too expensive to upgrade to modern hardware and so the benefit of better performance didn't exactly outweigh the costs?[/QUOTE] Not necessarily. That implies that someone just happens to know how to use the machine or is willing to invest time studying. Not to say that you should ever rely on security through obscurity. But this is legitimate issue that some companies are running into with legacy systems. A lot of old timers have retired. So the chances of finding someone who is an expert on that particular system is getting more slim each year. I highly doubt this is the case with the voting machines though. But yes that's the primary reason they use old systems. Its just too cost prohibitive for little benefit.

[QUOTE=redback3;46392092]afaik britain is paper votes[/QUOTE] Britain also doesn't have a max potential usage of 316 million votes. The U.S does. (assuming every citizen voted, not likely but it is technically possible.) The U.K has a population of like 61 million. Even if only 50% of the U.S population voted, it would still be over double the amount of paper used if every U.K citizen voted. Even if the amount of paper used is negligible at best, it's still not really fair to say the U.S. doesn't have to even consider this an issue because the U.K doesn't have to consider this an issue.

[QUOTE=Chernobyl426;46392268]Stop whining about using some fucking paper. We use paper every day in massive amounts.[/QUOTE] Ya just look at the massive amounts of wasted paper congress prints out only to not do anything with

The only time I ever used a paper ballot was the first time I voted in 2004. The ballot itself was extremely confusing and irritating because it just had names of people on it all lined up in no particular order and didn't tell what office they were running for. In 2006 they finally got voting machines, which while still annoying to use, were vastly superior to the old paper ballots.