Election Reform

If A actually wins by 60-40, the machine will not likely be maliciously programmed to give a read-out of B winning by 62 to 45. The programmer would be smart enough to know that people will be checking the totals. They are not dumb bunnies these programmers. Computers are extremely sophisticated pieces of technology. They only think for themselves after they've been programmed (a little like humans I suppose).

Whoever maliciously programmed the result might have done it this way:

The first line of programming tells the computer, if he wants a 4% flip, "After 9:00am, add every 50th vote for column A to column B instead." (a single vote switched from one column to another amounts to a 2% pt flip)

The second line of programming tells the computer, "At 7:00pm, delete this line of programming and the previous line of programming."

Election over, and the vote effectively flipped by 2% points from candidate A to candidate B and nobody is the wiser. In fact, it's impossible to trace out anything in the programming on the computer to prove anything. Of course, the clerks are well satisfied because the total number of votes remains the same regardless of what percentages voted for one candidate or the other.

And really who cares? It's just democracy.

On the other hand, IF THERE IS PAPER. Somebody can actually check by HAND-COUNTING to see what the ACTUAL VOTE was and is. Wouldn't that be wonderful, don't you think? It's called democracy. This is why the German constitutional court ruled in 2009 after a long trial that using computers to count the vote was un-democratic and would be illegal from that time forward.