Is Paper Low Status?
“Virginia has a lot of electronic voting and in general has an election system where it’s very hard to get recounts,” says Dill. “So I might worry about Virginia, depending on how close it is.” … It’s a lot easier to modify electronic records than to modify paper records which is why banking and a lot of other critical activities like that still rely on paper when there’s an ultimate disaster and electronic records are lost or corrupted. (more)
When I voted this morning in Virginia I noticed a line of 6-8 people waiting to use the electronic voting machines, but one could vote immediately on paper. Yet paper voting is less corruptible. I asked Alex Tabarrok and he said he puzzled over the same thing when he voted: why is paper voting so unpopular?
A fb comment noted that it is mostly old folks voting on paper. And that was true at my place as well. Which leads me to suggest that this is a status effect – people stand in line to vote less securely in order to signal that they aren’t old folks scared by or incompetent at electronics. Yes, it seems surprising that people are willing to spend an extra few minutes just to look hip to strangers. But what other explanation is there?
It seems likely that for younger people the computerized ballots actually DO present a more intuitive, interactive experience than the paper ballots. During such formalized transactions, fear of error is high and people will go out of their way to minimize potential for error, which, in this case, means using the system that you are most comfortable with.
Older folks have plenty of experience with the paper ballots and very little with electronic ballots (or at least: little with paper, even less with electronic). Younger people have the reverse position, and electronic ballots often give more structure to the process, with plenty of cues and instructions given without having to admit to being confused.
Combine this effect ( which might not apply to everyone) with people's tendency, when uncertain of themselves, to outsource their decisions to the crowd and you eventually get a whole bunch of young people standing in line for an electronic ballot.
A crude generalize hierarchy of factors affecting young people in the given situation: shame>time>security
(security is something that tends to have greatest influence on far-thought... in fact, the three factors I compared can be essentially read as a hierarchy of abstractness.. how much value is placed on one is inversely proportional to how "far" it is)
I think its the expectation that electronic will be fast and paper will be slow. That that expectation is incorrect does not mean a lot about bias.