The technology used for today's election has been in use since the 1980s (although obviously the postal system and paper is older than that). Each year we have an election and roll out a new ballot, and while it requires some nontrivlal amount of work to print and mail the ballots, the process is easily repeatable from one year to the next. Each year there is a new person in charge of the election, but each year it is easy to transfer the procedures and roll out the technology again.

My only fear about an electronic voting system is that we need to have something that is simple enough for a new person to take it over and master it within an hour. Our machine will eventually die, and our system administrator will eventually lose interest (or retire), and our software base may change with new people coming along. This is the natural evolution of technology, and so long as we can devise a system that is simple enough to be sustained over a period of 20 years, I think it has potential benefits.

Kevin McCurley

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