Maryland Tests Voting Machine, Declares Success

Dachannien writes "Capital News Service reports that the Maryland State Board of Elections has staged a test of its Diebold touch-screen voting machines in an effort to demonstrate their security and accuracy. A machine randomly selected from Maryland's voting machine warehouse was tested in a mock vote against two human vote-counting counterparts, and after counting fifty votes, the human vote counters had made several errors versus zero for the voting machine. But is this a legitimate test of the concerns of voting machine activists, or does it merely support a logical fallacy?"

Comments

Overstating computer reliability, yes

[Media Girl]

I mean things always happen. Just getting a new browser and email client have been months of hard work and debugging for the Mozilla developers.

Personally, I'm skeptical. People are willing to kill over $10 in someone's pocket. Why wouldn't we believe that people will resort to things like election machine tampering when it affects who controls the most powerful nation on Earth?

I'm not reassured by Diebold's CEO about "doing anything" to get Bush re-elected. But really, is a paper trail going to fix that?

There is nothing preventing a system from printing one thing, and logging another. Any hand-counted discrepancies would be considered "human error" and discounted, anyway. And while a code audit may not be realistic, having the machine's code secret due to patent rights is just plain silly!

Machines could be checked by a number of ways, including a sort of ghosting/registry check done by an independent agency supervised by the various parties. And so on.

But then there's the need to hardened the machines to external manipulation. The casinos have been fighting this for years, and still people find ways to cheat.

All we can do as citizens is keep fighting. The struggle for freedom will never go away, not even in the USA ... especially in the USA.