Are E-Voting Paper Trails A Bad Idea?
News.com is running an interview with Carnegie Mellon CS professor Michael Shamos, who is rather opinionated about everyone who keeps pushing for a voter-verified paper trail in e-voting machines. He thinks that a paper trail is a bad idea, but his reasoning is a bit problematic. Most of his complaints are around the fact that paper ballots aren’t particularly reliable either (which no one denies). But that, alone, isn’t a reason to get rid of a paper trail. After all, the idea is that the paper trail is a backup — a way to check and verify that the electronic votes are counted correctly. From there, Shamos complains that various voting laws say that if the e-voting totals and the paper totals don’t match up, you have to use the paper totals. To him, that’s a problem because (as he pointed out) the paper totals are not particularly reliable. But, again, the problem here isn’t actually with the paper trail, but the laws that automatically ditch the e-voting result, rather than specify
