Team AFollowing the debacle in Florida with the counting of paper ballots in the U.S. 2000 Presidential Election, many jurisdictions have mandated the use of electronic voting in which people vote at computer workstations on ballots presented with a Web interface. The counting of the ballots would be almost instantaneous after the closing of the polls and the results will be far less subject to the inaccuracies of manual counting. Furthermore, the voting software can be programmed to check for inconsistencies, such as voting for more than one candidate for one office, and for incompletenesses, such as failing to vote for any candidate for an office. It might even be possible to replace absentee balloting by mail with voting over the internet.
Team BA group of concerned citizens are concerned about the problems that the normal difficulties of computer use pose to the validity of the voting process. It is too easy for votes to be lost as computers or software crash. It is too easy for fraud to be perpetrated by those who know how to take advantage of defects in software to cause votes to be deleted or created. These problems are exacerbated when voting can be carried out over the internet. It is better to make traditional balloting more reliable.