At least in my town, people seem to prefer these drop-boxes and many, including me prefer to drop them off on election day, just for nostalgia, and also because of the remote fear of what AlexG55 says below.

that’s a corollary to Cobains’ Law, right?

But unlike switching machines, a faster voting machine isn’t better.  Reliable and trustworthy is better.

“ninety percent of everything is crap”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UiSMyyj-Ac

There’s also Finagle’s Law:

“Anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment.”

Nevertheless……

Although Hanlon’s and Occam’s razor, and Finagle’s Law might be valid and possible, these laws, or a better term, heuristics (rules of thumb) are not mutually exclusive with a vast conspiracy. 

Similar to 

“Just because I’m paranoid, my paranoia does Not mean They are Not out to get me.”

Forgot to say/cite, Finagle’s Law I learned from Larry Niven’s Known Space series, the pic attached to this comment is also from Niven’s ‘verse.

Here is the WikiP entry for Finagle’s Law:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finagle's_law

It is the unwillingness to do this simple thing that makes the e-voting manufacturers legitimately suspect.

Secondly, people actually HAVE leaked in this case.   Michael Connell spoke out and explained exactly what they did.  He was killed in a small plane crash within days.  Clinton Curtis testified in court that he was asked to rig votes.  Voting patterns have suggested that the machines are flipping votes: http://www.ukprogressive.co.uk/breaking-retired-nsa-analyst-proves-gop-is-stealing-elections/article20598.html

As I wrote below, the only two reasons not to allow e-voting machines to print out paper receipts are 1) you want to rig a vote or 2) you want to cover up issues with the voting machines.  I am not generally a conspiracy theorist, but in this case, Occam’s razor says to me that the simplest explanation – that the voting machines are insecure and open to rigging – is probably true.

But it’s not hard to imagine the jump from handing out your ballot to your employees with their paychecks to demanding their ballots before you hand them their paychecks.

But not all conspiracies are secret.  The ones to worry about are the ones who don’t give a damn who knows.

General purpose computers aren’t built to last because of Moore’s Law.  No point in building to last if, no matter what you build, it is guaranteed obsolete in 5-10.  But a voting machine isn’t a general purpose computer.  It has only one function, and it only gets used once every year or two.

Given that, why isn’t somebody out there designing a reliable, auditable electronic voting machine that can be used for 50 years?  My engineering days are long behind me, but this seems like a problem that wouldn’t be too hard to tackle.  In fact, if it could be done cheaply, there might be one hell of a market for it.

Right above, on the boingboing homepage we have the fact of the secretary of state (R) of Ohio ordering last minute unchecked, unverified “experimental” firmware being installed across the vote counting machines.  

As for “no one cares about it until presidential election years, and mostly right before that election” we’ve had Black Box Voting for what, 12 years now investigating the rigging of electronic machines, the “spaghetti code” the private, secret, proprietary algorithms, etc.  

Okay, go back to sleep.  No one has an interest in changing the results of a vote count.