Accurate voting might not be the best thing (Score:2) by cje (cje at my-deja.com) on Friday January 12, @02:14AM EST (#120) (User #33931 Info) http://kestrel.cso.uiuc.edu/~cje There are problems with several groups of voters, namely elderly voters and minority voters. The problem with these groups is that their votes are easily swayed by emotional rather than logical arguments. For example, if you tell an elderly voter that Republicans are going to cut their Social Security (even though that is largely misleading), they are more likely to vote Democrat. In fact, studies have shown that elderly voters are ten times more likely to vote straight-party Democrat that any other voter.
The same thing applies to minority voters when it comes to hot-button issues such as affirmative action and minority suffrage. Politicians are able to craft emotionally-charged messages that shift entire groups away from one party. Like the elderly voters, political parties (such as the Democrats) are able to persuade large groups of voters to cast all of their votes for a single party through purely emotional arguments. This is not a good thing for democracy, because casting a vote should be something that a person does after researching all the issues and candidates carefully.
Compounding this is the fact that the most inaccurate voting machines tend to be found in largely elderly or minority districts, because they are the poorest. This actually has a "cleansing effect" because the incorrectly-cast emotional votes tend to be cancelled out by the inaccuracy of the machines. But bringing 100% accuracy to these voting precincts would be a major mistake, because it would allow these emotional votes to be counted exactly as they were casted, and that could make a difference in extremely close races.
I know that none of this is politically correct, but the will of the people is best expressed when candidates are elected based on the logical strengths and weaknesses of their positions. The will of the people is not expressed when one political party is able to scare certain types of voters into voting for them. For this reason there is nothing wrong with a bit of inaccuracy in certain precincts. Affluent voters tend to educate themselves better with regards to election issues, and so it is only natural that they be given access to the more modern and accurate voting devices.
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