Last week, in the biggest election in the history of the United States, the electoral system was upgraded to much simpler voting machines. These new machines are better for both the voters as well as the voting staff who have to count the votes because the counting is done digitally instead of having to count each ballot individually, these machines can count automatically and save time and struggle.  The other benefit it that by using a computer to count is it eliminates the human errors that occurred in the 2000 election, with the hanging chads on the Florida paper ballots.

I was able to vote for the first time this Election and at my own polling place, the machine was a panel with buttons on for each party  for each office, it also had a straight ticket button to select all the candidates from one party to save time of pushing all those buttons. I believe, that this solution is the best because if the machines move to LCD touch screens, they will be more expensive and have more things that can go wrong with the machines. However, if they do go towards that solution I would recommend that they use a specialized version of Linux that only does what it has to making it more secure and allows it to do what it needs to the best it can and removes functions that are not needed and could compromise the integrity of the vote.

The problem many people have with using digital voting is that if they are based on computer, computers can be hacked and could result in inaccurate results. That is why I believe that by using a limited version of Linux that would only do what it needs to and would be designed to not be hacked. The other issue is people need to be presumed to be technically literate, or to be capable to using these machines successfully. In order to make the transition to these machines fully successful, would require training sessions for people to make sure they know how to operate the machines.

I also think that another idea that could be utilized is voting over the Internet. That would allow people to vote without having to stand in lines and spend time and would result in a better vote turnout because people would have no reason not to vote. This would require use of specialized PIN numbers and a secure website to prevent voting fraud but, I think that would be the best option because then anyone could vote. Even if the people do not have their own Internet access, they could go to a public place with computers available to vote.