As I was walking back from voting this morning, a discussion of electronic voting came up. I think that the word Risk was never brought up when these systems were designed. Or maybe it was?

Lets build the next Amazon.com using electronic voting machines.

By some form of batch or manual entry the store information, pricing, etc. gets entered into all the machines people will use.

When it is your turn to use the machine you authenticate yourself to a person who directs you to a machine.

You enter your information into this machine and place your order which is stored on the machine.

Sometime later in the day a person removes the data from the machine and sends it to be processed.

The retailer does not really know what was entered into the machine. You have no idea if you entered the right information. You have no idea if the order actually was received, got processed, and you have no idea if your order will ever ship.

I think we can do better!

Note: My scan type paper ballot was not all that good either. Seems that they mis-printed one of the ballot items so you got a second paper that told you what the real wording is and you voted yes or no to that new wording; long and sad sigh. Well at least there is a partial paper trail and no hanging chads.