Buggy, obsolete, costly electronic voting machines often cause more problems than they solve
Bloomberg : Tweets: @hoofnagle , @pomeranian99 and @mkyeg Tweets: Chris Hoofnagle / @hoofnagle : Thanks to revolution in voting technology, “Election officials now have more ways than ever to screw up a vote.” http://www.bloomberg.com/... Clive Thompson / @pomeranian99 : In 2008, I reported that electronic voting machines were a buggy mess: http://www.nytimes.com/... Still true: http://www.bloomberg.com/... Martin Kennedy / @mkyeg : There are real dangers with electronic balloting, networked tabulation and online voting. http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
When Bloomberg flagged electronic voting machines as buggy, obsolete and costly in October 2016, Clive Thompson noted he had reported the same 'buggy mess' back in 2008 — the problem was already old news then. The related coverage since has validated the warning repeatedly: ES&S admitted to Sen. Wyden that some systems sold from 2000-2006 carried a remote access feature it had earlier denied, and researchers later found dozens of its systems online despite claims they were never internet-connected.
First-order effects
- Election officials running aging machines face the direct cost of replacement and error-prone elections, while vendors like ES&S face scrutiny over connectivity claims contradicted by researchers finding 35 of its systems online across 10 states.
Second-order effects
- Replacement is slow and uneven — 14 states still used paperless machines in 2018 that experts call easily hackable — creating demand for audit-first vendors like Clear Ballot, whose ballot-checking app lets officials verify paper records instead of trusting the machine.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US election infrastructure restructures around paper trails and post-election audits rather than paperless tabulation, with vendor credibility becoming a political liability as hacking claims — including those spread by Elon Musk per the Clear Ballot profile — exploit every documented weakness.
The trend: US election technology is shifting from closed, paperless machine tabulation toward paper-verifiable systems with independent audits, pushed by a decade of documented machine failures and eroding public trust.