Electronic voting

Essay by mazatlan1998College, UndergraduateA-, February 2004

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During election times my wife and I tend to debate about the presidential candidates and their respective issues, however this year our main topic of discussion has been focused towards electronic voting and our dislike of it. Some of the reasons why we strongly oppose it are because there is no way of insuring its accuracy, it is very easy to commit fraud, and there is a lack of confidentiality.

The most important issue during elections is insuring accuracy when counting votes. It is important that there be a required voter verified trail for election, however in electronic voting there is not a permanent record of each vote that the voter can check to verify that it represents his or her intent, so that any errors and irregularities caused by the computers can be discovered. In the past, machines used for electronic voting have failed in actual use, not only displaying choices that were not selected by the voters, but also by miss-recording votes.

Secondly, fraud is more obvious to occur in the presence of electronic voting. There is always the possibility that a person on the Internet with the wrong intention could alter the election and vote many times for the candidate of his or her choice. Also, personnel belonging to a respective party could create false votes and not come under detection. The thought will always cross our minds that dishonesty could exist within the system developers, in which they could use secret software to control the outcome of the election.

Last, confidentiality is often lost during electronic voting. If we are using a computer there is always the vulnerability that someone could be monitoring the system by means of a Trojan horse. The voting counts are never protected from external reading during the voting...