You brought up paper ballots for voting and then blamed them for 9/11 and the Iraq war. If that's your definition of "debate" I don't think I can help you.
> What's next, telephone switchboard operators are better than VOIP?
If you're so into debate you might want to look up "straw man argument".
The key design principle for a voting system is that voters should be confident in the results. That means if there's a paper ballot, the voter should be able to understand what it says (ie not just some QR or PDF417 or similar code). The worst that can really happen with paper ballots is ballot-stuffing but there are lots of checks and balances in place such that there's no evidence of this having ever been a widescale problem in the US, let alone has changed the result of an election. A pure electronic count has no such safeguards and no real capability for an audit trail.
> There was a time that chess playing programs were laughably bad. And within a couple decades they are able to beat any grandmaster. Give it time.
Here you come across as the very kind of person I mentioned, a Blockchain Andy who has completely drunk the Kool-Aid. Chess is a compute power problem. Electronic voting is not a computing power of algorithm or even a technical problem.
> ... because the real point is that it took TOO LONG to recount the votes,
No, it wasn't. The real problem in 2000 was that multiple recounts were done selectively to a changing standard of what constituted a valid vote even contradicting the instructions given to voters to "divine the intent of the voter".
> and thus GWB was elected because the Supreme Court stepped in
GWB won because he got more votes with the rules that existed for that election. Period. I don't say that as a partisan (for the record, I'm a leftist closest to the Bernie camp). It's just fact. Even a comprehensive review of ballots by the NYTimes after the election showed GWB won even with the most favourable change of rules (eg dimpled chads).
I am aware that there are various opinions on it, but once again, it's not so "clear cut" as to not have a debate. In fact, the sources I'm following, such as Wikipedia, say exactly the opposite about the media recounts:
In 2001, the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, sponsored by a consortium of major United States news organizations, conducted the Florida Ballot Project, a comprehensive review of 175,010 ballots that vote-counting machines had rejected from the entire state, not just the disputed counties that were recounted.[3] The project's goal was to determine the reliability and accuracy of the systems used in the voting process, including how different systems correlated with voter mistakes. The study was conducted over a period of 10 months. Based on the review, the media group concluded that if the disputes over the validity of all the ballots in question had been consistently resolved and any uniform standard applied, the electoral result would have been reversed and Gore would have won by 60 to 171 votes.[4] On the other hand, under scenarios involving review of limited sets of ballots uncounted by machines, Bush would have kept his lead. In one such scenario — Al Gore's request for recounts in four predominantly Democratic counties — Bush would have won by 225 votes.[a] In another scenario (if the remaining 64 Florida counties had carried out the hand recount of disputed ballots ordered by the Florida Supreme Court on December 8, applying the various standards that county election officials said they would have used), Bush would have emerged the victor by 493 votes.[b][81]
The emphasis above was added by me... far more media organizations, and a comprehensive analysis, and so forth. How much more extensive can you get, and the result is that Al Gore would have won under any uniform standard at all. And again ... this was all because of the outdated technology. Call it what you want, paper ballots, rejecting by voting machines that counted them, etc. The fact is, the election would have been a lot MORE reliable if it was done with Merkle Trees and private keys, as I said.
And no, I'm not a Blockchain Andy who's completely drunk the Kool-Aid. I often critique Blockchain right here on HN, I think Blockchain holds Web3 back. But the actual applications are very viable (if we move past blockchain as the technology on which they are built) and we'll all be voting from our phones in 10 years. Do you think that somehow voting is one application that won't make the switch from manual paper-based counting to technology, because people can't be "confident of the results" from their electronics?
You brought up paper ballots for voting and then blamed them for 9/11 and the Iraq war. If that's your definition of "debate" I don't think I can help you.
> What's next, telephone switchboard operators are better than VOIP?
If you're so into debate you might want to look up "straw man argument".
The key design principle for a voting system is that voters should be confident in the results. That means if there's a paper ballot, the voter should be able to understand what it says (ie not just some QR or PDF417 or similar code). The worst that can really happen with paper ballots is ballot-stuffing but there are lots of checks and balances in place such that there's no evidence of this having ever been a widescale problem in the US, let alone has changed the result of an election. A pure electronic count has no such safeguards and no real capability for an audit trail.
> There was a time that chess playing programs were laughably bad. And within a couple decades they are able to beat any grandmaster. Give it time.
Here you come across as the very kind of person I mentioned, a Blockchain Andy who has completely drunk the Kool-Aid. Chess is a compute power problem. Electronic voting is not a computing power of algorithm or even a technical problem.
> ... because the real point is that it took TOO LONG to recount the votes,
No, it wasn't. The real problem in 2000 was that multiple recounts were done selectively to a changing standard of what constituted a valid vote even contradicting the instructions given to voters to "divine the intent of the voter".
> and thus GWB was elected because the Supreme Court stepped in
GWB won because he got more votes with the rules that existed for that election. Period. I don't say that as a partisan (for the record, I'm a leftist closest to the Bernie camp). It's just fact. Even a comprehensive review of ballots by the NYTimes after the election showed GWB won even with the most favourable change of rules (eg dimpled chads).