Wired News on e-Voting Paper Trails

I don't understand how anyone can claim that neglecting redundancy in something as critical as voting is a bad idea. This isn't even an argument:

"They're adamant that few voters will actually look at the paper record, negating its usefulness. During a test of paper trails last year in Nevada's primary and presidential elections, election observers estimated that fewer than 30 percent of voters bothered to examine the hard copy."

The usefulness of the paper trail does not lie with the individual voter, it's having the ability to verify the election results. Don't take it from me, take it from Kim Alexander, the founder of the California Voter Foundation:

"'It gives voters the opportunity to verify their vote, but it also gives election officials a meaningful audit trail to verify software vote tallies, and it's that latter purpose that has made the paper trail a no-brainer,' she said." [emphasis added]

This is an equally pathetic argument against paper ballots:

"Critics also say the printers will jam, break down or run out of paper, creating more labor for poll workers. And they argue that an election involving numerous races and candidates would produce an unwieldy paper trail that would be time-consuming for voters to review and difficult for election officials to recount -- especially if the thermal paper used in the printers is tightly curled."

. . .

Let me repeat that - we can't verify the results of the election because the voting machine's paper is just too tightly curled. Sorry. Better luck next election cycle!

These arguments are absurd. They didn't make these types of bullshit arguments when we had no other option but to use paper, why is it all of a sudden such a concern? How much was spent on electronic voting machines and how much labor goes into their technical support? Furthermore, who can honestly say they prefer an unproven technology that is demonstrably insecure with no backup or a backup? I guess scumbags like Diebold have no problem saying such things ...

So who says they're sucesptible to manipulation? Hell, even Fox News covered the topic (albeit with a ... well, believably biased headline).

Also consider Ars Technica's guide to stealing an election, the State of Florida's refusal to return to Diebold, and Princeton University's security analysis for electronic voting. But of course you, my dear John Q. Public, you alone are smarter than all of those ivory-tower types scattered across the internet and, um, at Fox News, and you know your vote will be counted correctly. Well, you sure can go home smug in your smartness, especially if you're one of the 18,000 or so Florida voters whose ballots were lost this election cycle. Brilliant.

I don't understand - just because our brains function as a collective "DEE-dee-dee!", that is no excuse for our elections to be less transparent than, say, Kyrgyzstan.

These security issues with electronic voting have been well-documented since the 1980s, and yet we are still have not implemented appropriate checks and balances two decades later.

What is wrong with people? What's next, voting through TiVo?