Out of the Frying Pan ...

April 15, 2004
Matthew Frederick Streib
Cornell Daily Sun

When it comes to voting, America has greater problems than the Electoral College. After the mess that was the 2000 election, Congress passed 2002's Help America Vote Act to straighten out the electoral process. The favored solution appears to be electronic voting, which is quickly sweeping the nation. Nevertheless, electronic voting currently has more flaws than a diamond bought on the streets of Chinatown.

Primarily, there is the inability of the state or voters to audit the system, or verify that the results reflect the votes cast. Say you vote on one of these machines. In order to ensure anonymity, your vote is randomly saved on the machine's hard drive. Because it is not in sequential order, there is no way to verify if the vote you cast was ever legitimately recorded. Essentially, all it would take is one hacker to infiltrate the system or one programming glitch and the votes would be altered.

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