Also on Elections Voting

I've been reading this article on electronic voting, which superbly exemplifies Salon's tradition of mediocre journalism. Day-pass may be required to read it.

Here is a truly asinine comment:

There is something of an inconsistency to what Dill says, however. On the one hand, he's insisting that elections can't be trusted unless they're conducted on equipment that produces some kind of verifiable paper trail. At the same time, he's telling voters that they should probably go ahead and vote on machines that don't produce such a trail, machines that he says can't be trusted. Now, most people will probably disregard this inconsistency and, even if they agree with Dill that the machines are flawed, they'll still go ahead and vote. As Dill says, this year's election is far too important to miss out on.

Now, the statement seems to rebut itself, but to "earn my keep" I'll just point out the obvious.

In order for the two hands to be "inconsistent" there must be some kind of inherent contradiction. However, Dill (a computer scientist and critic of electronic systems without verifying paper-trails) comes across with as a man with one simple and coherent point: Electronic systems without some form of manual verification are inherently insecure. His only reason for making this point is that such systems are in use by 29% of the American electorate. Now, his first conclusion derived from this argument is that new machines should be installed or existing machines modified. However, it does not follow from this point that one shouldn't vote using the only equipment available because it may not be fully secure.

Now there are a lot of folks who are a long way from logicians... but even still... unless you know in advance that an election has been rigged, there is no more nor less reason not to vote than before. There may be an incentive to vote absentee if you think it a more secure method. But there have always been better and worse voting technologies available, and never before have I heard people argue that because one kind of voting technology was less reliable than another that voters should choose not to vote, rather than use the only (flawed) technology available. Dill's idea is to improve the technology we use. That hardly makes his position that people should still vote "inconsistent."

As long as we're at it, I'd like to give the following line from the article an award for Most Clueless Deployment of a Word with Multiple Senses:

Still, two years after witnessing that Florida debacle, Rodriguez-Taseff, who founded and now heads the Miami-Dade Reform Coalition, a nonpartisan citizen's group dedicated to fixing elections in a county where elections seem eternally unfixable, remains deeply worried about the electronic systems that will be used at her polls this year.