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Much like my complaints about irregularities, violations of law and policy, and the decline of true secret balloting, I actually am very sympathetic to people that are highly suspicious of voting machines. There simply is no need for voting machines with software. Introducing additional vulnerabilities where they're not strictly necessary is just a bad idea on general principle. People should simply show up to their voting location, present their identification for comparison against the registered voters in the locale, complete a paper ballot, and have that ballot counted locally with results reported to a central location. Additional mechanisms that involve software, ballot movement, centralization, and so on just introduce unnecessary vulnerabilities that rightfully decrease trust in elections. I don't really think there is any grand conspiracy going on, but if there was, it would probably involve introducing a bunch of pointless vulnerabilities with pretty lame excuses for doing so.
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