Voting electronically

With the US presidential elections drawing closer by the day, here’s a look at the various forms of electronic/computerized voting systems in use across the world.

It looks at the Smartmatic machines used in Venezuela, which uses fingerprint tracking and paper receipts to keep fraud down. Then it checks out the EVMs used in India, which are nothing but electronic counters that simply store a count of the votes polled. The article also evaluates the first steps taken by Australia by introducing eVACS, built with open-source software with a hope of inspiring trust in its voting system.

While foreign voting systems are certainly far from perfect, both supporters and detractors of e-voting agree that the United States can learn some important lessons from parts of the world that have not been historically associated with sophisticated voting technologies.

I agree with that view. Instead of trying to hope for a perfect system, I feel the US should’ve gone ahead with some proven ideas from either the Indian or the Venezuelan polls. With all the cribbing about the security, only 31% of US voters would actually vote electronically (using the controversial Diebold machines, I presume) in the elections later this year.