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Inside Electronic Voting Machines
Alien54 and several other people wrote in about a couple of stories published in a New Zealand webzine: an examination of an electronic voting system, and some less interesting political speculation about it. Diebold voting systems are in fairly wide use, and apparently provide zero security to keep election officials from writing in whatever election totals they want.
This should be of no surprise to anyone familiar with Diebold. You may have noticed that these guys are the makers of bank ATMs, among other banking and security equipment. Most of these ATMs, especially the older ones, use only 56bit encryption. 128bit is available in the form of a ridiculously expensive chip which also costs a few hundred dollars labor to have a tech come out and stick it in. Most banks, being the biggest cheap-skates in business, are unwilling to spend the money for these upgrades so, many of the ATMs that you regularly use likely have 56bit encryption at best.
Make a public domain design&software for a voting machine. Get five companies to build them. No one company can rig the election.
My only big design point is Dual Receipt, like a credit card transaction. Fast electronic count, paper count for them, paper count for me.
Start Running Better Polls
Three years later, and it seems that equipment manufacturers have managed to blithely ignore every bit of it. And apparently, so have the people purchasing the stuff.
United States citizens don't have a right to responsibly vote, they have a right to vote. If you open a door for literacy, why not require that people have certain moral standards? Why not require that they not be communists? Why not require that they be conservative or liberal or white or black?
Then again, it would only take one fraudster to falsly claim their vote had been miscounted.
Also, any system that lets the voter check their vote also lets someone forcing them to vote one way or another to verify that they've done as commanded.
But the Diebold machines leave *no* paper trail - there are no paper ballots to check againts. Once the database is tampered with there is no way to reconstruct the voter's intent.
No kidding, these things have the potential to be a disaster for the democratic process, enabling voting fraud on a scale never before seen.
Except in Florida.
I'm much funnier now that I'm a subscriber.
During the 2000 election mess, Canada just happened to have an election. We found out our results about 15 hours after ballots were closed.
This isn't a troll about Florida, etc. but rather a comparison. America uses punch cards and fancy voting machines and all that stuff.
Canada, OTOH has a piece of paper. With some names on it, and circles next to the names. you put a mark (check, X, your initials, whatever) next to the person you want to vote for. If there's a mark in more than one (and not just a small pencil mark like a dot. Something that actually looks like you meant to vote for more than one person) or no marks at all, the vote is thrown out. Everything is counted by humans.
So, why is it that they're looking for new fancy ways to (screw up) voting, when countries like Canada managed to use circa 1868 technology and have a more efficient (based on 2k elections) system?