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mendax [soylentnews.org] writes:

Wired has an article [wired.com] that exposes what many of us already know: Voting machines in the United States are out-of-date, horrid, and often don't work:

As the US presidential election season heats up, the public has focused on the candidates vying for the nation’s top office. But whether Donald Trump will secure the Republican nomination is secondary to a more serious quandary: whether the nation’s voting machines will hold up when Americans head to the polls in 2016.

Nearly every state is using electronic touchscreen and optical-scan voting systems that are at least a decade old, according to a report [wired.com] by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. Beyond the fact the machines are technologically antiquated, after years of wear and tear, states are reporting increasing problems with degrading touchscreens, worn-out modems for transmitting election results, and failing motherboards and memory cards.

States using machines that are at least 15 years old include Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Texas, Virginia, and Washington, which means they are far behind even a casual tech user in keeping pace with technological advancements.

Most of us here know how decrepit computers can be as they get older, as capacitors dry out, soldered connections start to come loose, and external connectors oxidize or wear out. (The fact that I'm writing this on an 8-year-old iMac amazes me.) One wonders if election authorities gave this any thought as they plowed thousands of dollars per machine into a system of voting that would fail after only a couple election cycles.

As for myself, I vote by mail, using a paper ballot. Kind of hard for that voting system to break down.

Original Submission