>> You understand paper and pen. It's right there.
> You think you do, but then you look into the 2000 Bush-Gore election. We'll never know who actually won because of hanging chads.
Punch cards are not "paper and pen."
> It could happen with any analog system. If it's fill-in-the-bubble, how do you count underfils? Or one candidate fully filled and the opponent slightly filled? When you get 10M pen and paper samples, you'll get sampling errors, and in a close election, there won't be a clear winner.
A paper and pen system may not be perfect, but regular people can understand it fully including the failure modes and exceptions.
No so with computer systems, they can be so totally inscrutable. What if instead of hanging chads, it was a buffer overflow that corrupted 500 votes before they could be tabulated? CNN could have experts talk about it nonstop for a week, and all most people would get out of it is that computers are inscrutable and unreliable.
> You think you do, but then you look into the 2000 Bush-Gore election. We'll never know who actually won because of hanging chads.
Punch cards are not "paper and pen."
> It could happen with any analog system. If it's fill-in-the-bubble, how do you count underfils? Or one candidate fully filled and the opponent slightly filled? When you get 10M pen and paper samples, you'll get sampling errors, and in a close election, there won't be a clear winner.
A paper and pen system may not be perfect, but regular people can understand it fully including the failure modes and exceptions.
No so with computer systems, they can be so totally inscrutable. What if instead of hanging chads, it was a buffer overflow that corrupted 500 votes before they could be tabulated? CNN could have experts talk about it nonstop for a week, and all most people would get out of it is that computers are inscrutable and unreliable.