Software, Politics, and Voting Machines
Recently there was a discussion of Electronic Voting Machines on NPR. My informed opinion: The current wave of computer based voting machines is a political disaster waiting to happen. I don’t care which party you are in, if you care about democracy, and should care about voting machine technology.
There’s no such thing as a totally secure computer environment, and a recent study shows how easy it is to subvert one modern voting machine. But don’t let the fact that they only broke into one brand of machine fool you, nobody is going to make a totally secure voting system. When the stakes are high enough, whatever security you have will be hacked, and we’ll have voter fraud. And even if you could be 100% sure that the machine wasn’t tampered with, it’s impossible to be completely sure no bugs have screwed up the totals?
As Software professionals, we need to speak with one voice on this issue. Bruce Schneider explains what we all pretty much already know:
Computer security experts are unanimous on what to do…
- DRE machines must have a voter-verifiable paper audit trails…
- Software used on DRE machines must be open to public scrutiny…
I know I’m pretty much preaching to the choir on this blog, but I’m also commiting to explaining the need for voter-verifiable paper trails to a dozen non-technical people over the next two weeks. If you can, I’d ask you to do the same thing. And if you have a blog, please ask your readers to do the same thing.
This isn’t about party loyalty, it’s about preserving democracy.
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