Friday, October 19, 2012

THIS IS WHY you won't vote online anytime soon. Truth is, why should you? In Spain, with just paper --albeit with computerized tallies-- results at 99% are released only a couple of hours after polls close. It's only 25 million votes in a general election and other countries are bigger, to be sure. Namely the US, with a 2008 presidential election turnout of approximately 130m. But that wouldn't mean that 5x votes would mean 5x delay in getting the results, since the recount is done by teams working in parallel. You'd need more people assigned to the job, but it could be reasonably done in pretty much the same time frame. It's reasonable because there's no risks, which is something that can't be said of e-voting.