HOW SECURE IS ELECTRONIC VOTING IN TEXAS?

    There are couple of methods for people to vote such as paper ballot, mails, electronic voting. People may pick one of these options depending on the convenience or even security. As technology has been developing, electronic voting gradually becomes a more well-known method. Unfortunately, some Texas are concerned that electronic voting may lead to fraud at the polls. So, how secure electronic voting is in Texas. I think it depends on the reliability of the voting system.

    Electronic voting is chosen more by most voters these days. It is due to the approach of modern technologies. Some people, or for example Joan Cunningham, a new citizen in Texas, may think that voting machines can be more efficient and fast-processing, but what if things go wrong and data can get corrupted or changed or lost. People think the software which is set up for voting machine is reliable, but in fact it is programmed by human who are not considered to be reliable at all. So, it may have errors in programming also, and it is not exactly sure that voting machines may go smoothly at every election. Actually, these types of programming errors have been happened in the past elections and this have been checked by audits or recount. There is no paper backup which can record the votes, it is not pretty much ensure that the individual voter have their official votes recorded. On other perspective, Harris County switched to electronic voting in 2002, and there is not even a big error occurs during voting session. Electronic voting has been checked and double checked to make sure everything is working in this county.

   How about traditional paper ballots? As people have been known this voting technique, it is basically filled out the paper ballot and drops it in a box. It is pretty much it, and the votes will be counted at the end of Election Day. This method may be too old-fashioned for young people, and they prefer other voting methods. Clerk Stannart from Harris County expressed that paperless is far more secure because papers can have problems such as run out of ink, broken printer, and the punch cards can cause issue to cancel out someone’s vote or vote for someone else. Paper ballot also has its down sides.

   These errors from both electronic and paper method can cause low voter turnouts due to fraud incidence. People may decide not to vote because they know that the results are likely not to be accurate. Therefore, I think the secure of electronic and paper voting in Texas should depend on the reliable person running it. As it is, most counties should have trained poll workers to make sure they administer the system fairly.