Where the political will exists to have secure voting systems, a mechanical voting system is best. Everything is transparent there is literally just one voting "egister per candidate. Cheating is always possible and indeed probable but likely to just occur on a small scale. By necessity more people must be involved for significant cheating to occur on a large scale.
With a computer system it is simply physically impossible to be sure for the Board of Election to be sure which software is installed on their systems.)And indeed if you had read through the links you would see that is one of the current problems. ) Also, you can't "see" how many registers there are in a software system. NY State has banned networking the voting machines together but the vendors are using off the shelf components. How do you guarantee there's no access via wifi or bluetooth? You can't, the manpower to do this simply doesn't exist.
Many vendors lobbied hard for computerized voting machines. They are far more expensive to purchase and maintain and its a good income stream for them and a new excessively large expense for taxpayers. That money is going to be paid and come from existing programs This is not in the interest of most voters.
Voting fraud can occur on a larger scale with fewer people involved.
Its not intuitively easy for most people to get how insecure a computerized system is. Despite the stories we hear about hackers, ID theft, corporations' database's being tresspassed and compromised, most of us are use to using many computers throughout the day without any problems. Why should a voting system be any different? At first glance, most people have thought it was an excellant idea.
Most people don't recall the huge learning curve society had to go through to have reliable working computer systems. Now we do, for the most part, but these are computer systems run and maintained on a daily basis. Not, at most used just a couple of times a year.
Another significant difference involved is that most computerized transactions are "audited" at one point or another by individuals. Many people check their bank statements and invoices -- they won't just assume that its correct.
With a system that relies on the right to keep your vote secret the same type of checking is not possible. Different controls, checks and balances need to be in place.
The mechanical voting machines when well maintained worked very well. How many of us still use pencils? Just like sometimes a pencil is still the best tool for the job, a mechanical voting machine is the best tool for many jobs also.
If you really want to know about the subject, read the links. There are many documented cases of abuses that surpass the problems that we had with mechanical voting machines before most of the country replaced them. I'm not going to regurgitate them for you -- they are in the links.
You might be interested to know that many programmers have gotten motivated to do grassroots lobbying in this area. The webmaster behind
www.wheresthepaper.org is a database programmer. The head of NYers for Verified Voting is also a programmer.
ETA: Another point is that in a democracy its important for relatively unskilled people to be able to be involved in the democratic process also. Not just in voting but also to be able to participate in the system as poll workers, observers and tabulators. It would be desructive to the process to limit this ability to a few select "experts."
