A voting machine is a device to record and register votes to be counted as per any voting system, with or without printing a ballot for the voter to verify.

Some view it as an even more secure improvement on a secret ballot and the manual systems of human vote counters and scrutineers. Spoiled ballots and overvoting are eliminated, undervoting is greatly reduced, and voting by the disabled becomes much easier, and can be done in private without assistance.

However, in part because for political privacy votes cannot be revealed as cast, and in part because of the increasingly complex technology involved, it is subject to various vulnerabilities and compromises of design. Historically there are many incidents of voting machine compromise. As with a slot machine there is very high motivation to meddle with the numbers.

The integrity and legitimacy of electronic voting rests totally on the reliability of software for voting. Proposals for Open Source voting software have been gaining ground as proprietary closed-source software is not auditable for manipulation attempts by the software provider or its employees and is revealed more and more to be buggy.

External links

• Open Vote Foundation
• Verified Voting Foundation
• VoteHere - developer of voting audit technology
• Black Box Voting Reports problems with voting technology
• The trouble with technology - The Economist, Sep 16th 2004
• E-voting machines' confidence gap - Christian Science Monitor, October 4, 2004
• Diebold - maker of electronic voting machines
• Open Voting Consortium Trade association to create Open Source voting software

See also

• List of democracy and elections-related topics
• Black Box Voting
• Voting
• Indian voting machines
• Brazilian voting machine
• voting lever
• Voting system
• Electoral systems