> ... they print a "zero tape at the beginning of the voting day and
> then a "final tally" tape at the end. And the vote counts have to
> match meters on the front of the machines ...
This is the answer I got from my polling place in Montgomery county,
MD in 2004. Sure, if the number of total votes recorded by the
machines match the number of voters who walked in, that simply
means there hasn't been an electronic equivalent of ballot box
stuffing.
That does _not_ mean that those black box voting machines didn't
incorrectly recorded voters' choices. And, there's no way to
audit that fact without voters' choices being recorded in a medium
that could be hand counted (ie: voter verified paper records).
If they can't re-count without using the same (suspected) machines,
then I don't trust that system.
> While I have my own doubts about the programming of the machines,
> I think that the actual vote count is relatively secure.
Why should we believe the election officials or the black box
manufacturers that the count is accurate? The officials can test
the machines before the election day for various scenarios. The
manufacturer can have various internal quality testing. Yet, it
only takes one not-so-honest programmer to do something like the
following to skew the tallies on the election day.
if (today = election_day) #easy to predict in the US
if ( 8am < time < 5pm)
magik_min = RANDOM_NUMBER (3 to 53)
if ( magik_min < time_minutes < magik_min+4 )
do { display voter's selection
screw the voter and add votes to Party_X
}
end-if
end-if
end-if
The election officials won't catch this in their testing before
the election day. How do we know the manufacturer's QA is
good enough? If the HW are standard components and the software
is open, then others can do code audits.
Moreover, who knows if there are bugs that get triggered by a
specific sequence of events (ie: insert card; remove card; insert
card; touch screen; remove card; insert card; vote for the first
office; remove card; (ie: voting not completed) next person insert
card ... bug got triggered and the internal counters got totally
messed up) If the machine is a sealed black box, how do we know
there's no bug like that? Or even more weird ones? If the software
is open, then code audits might catch it and the bug could be fixed.
> There has been much made about voter fraud and draconian identity
> schemes imposed to prevent it, but I think the problem posed by
> hacked voting machine software is orders of magnitude more serious
> and has been paid little or no attention (the denials of the
> machine vendors notwithstanding).
A well thought-out process would require election officials to reset
the machines (wipe their programs clean) and install the latest
software just before the election begins. Of course, proprietary
machine manufacturers would object to election officials being able
to have access to the internals.
As others have pointed out, punch card machines or optical scanners
would make much better, simple yet effective, mechanized voting
systems. However, the counting part of even those systems could be
influenced just as above. So, their codes must also be audited.
Moreover, the election results should be randomly audited against
the paper records to make sure nothing funny actually happened.
Just having the paper records is not sufficient.
And, we've spent how many billions of dollars (supposedly) to bring
democracy to Iraq? Why can't the federal government spend just a
tiny fraction of that money to bring a single, standard voting
system to our own country?
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