Re: [FRIAM] voting machine tampering

[Pamela McCorduck]

The National Academies, which did a preliminary study on this, think the systems are very vulnerable to fraud, much of it undetectable. Two kinds of problems: the technological ones, where voting machines can be hacked--wirelessly or otherwise, and tampered with. The social problems: like school boards, each local voting authority has its own rules, so no one-program-fits-all exists (or can exist). Poll watchers and workers are mostly political sinecures, and such people, often elderly and not well educated, can barely manage the technology they have, let alone anything more sophisticated.




On Nov 7, 2006, at 10:22 AM, Robert Holmes wrote:

Not really no. About 30% of the installed machines are the Diebold touch-screen model that does NOT give you a printout. There's no paper trail and absolutely no way to check that what the person voted for is what the machine recorded. In addition, Diebold won't release source code because it's proprietary. And the Independent Testing Authority refuses to release details of its test program. And anyway, in some states ITA testing is voluntary - vendors only need to provide a letter that their machines are capable of passing the tests.

So from a computer science or security perspective, how robust do you think this system is?

Robert

On 11/6/06, Owen Densmore < [EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:Won't the electronic voting at least provide a hope for analysis,

especially of "irregularities"?

     -- Owen

Owen Densmore   http://backspaces.net




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============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org