Why Your Toaster Works Better Than Your Voting Machine

The Atlantic's politics blog offers this discussion.

The key?

"The instruments entrusted with our democracy, in other words, get less scrutiny than our toasters."

As a recent report from the Brennan Center for Justice argues,

"For the vast majority of voting systems in use today, manufacturers are not required to report malfunctions to any government agency, and there is no agency that either investigates such alleged failures or alerts election officials and the general public to possible problems."

The crux of the argument is that the US should either go big or go home when it comes to electronic voting machines. Either we go back to paper, flawed but with certain advantages, or invest in a system worthy of its importance to our democracy.