Avi Rubin

In any election, it's important that the public perceive that the election is held fairly.

If our financial industry regarded security the way the health-care sector does, I would stuff my cash in a mattress under my bed.

My position hasn't changed over the years. Which is that online voting is a very unsafe idea and a very bad idea and something I think no technological breakthrough I can foresee can ever change.

The basic idea behind a paper trail is that you take one of these electronic systems and you augment it with a printer that prints out people's vote as they vote.

Many of the touted advantages of electronic voting can still be achieved with paper ballots if you use a computerized ballot marking scheme.

I think that, you know, looking at all the systems that I've been studying over the last several years, that paper ballots with a precinct optical scan counters and random audits is the best system that we can have.

It's the concept of having a computer voting machine that bothers me, more so than the specific poor implementation that we have from Diebold.