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Ohio Investigating Possible Vote Machine Tampering Last Year
MozeeToby writes "The Columbus Dispatch is reporting on a criminal investigation currently being performed in Franklin County Ohio. It seems several voting machines listed a candidate as withdrawn from the race when in fact he wasn't. By the time the investigations tracked down which machines had been affected, the candidate's name was back on the ballot. Normally, we could dismiss this as confusion or a mistake on the part of the voter(s) who noticed it. In this case, the person who first noticed the discrepancy was Ohio Secretary of state Jennifer Brunner. Further compounding matters, the Franklin County Board of Elections had disabled virtually all logging on the machines to speed setup of the ballot. Naturally, the county board remains skeptical of these accusations."
It's better than when Diebold leaked the election results. http://www.theonion.com/content/video/diebold_accidentally_leaks
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
This is exactly right. All voting technologies, paper or electronic, will have vulnerabilities. The way to solve this problem is to have enough redundancy in the system that makes it very difficult for all mechanisms to fail, or be corrupted, simultaneously and similarly. We have learned this lesson from building fault-tolerant computer systems, and need to apply it here, too. We also need to include the human element in the fault-tolerant design, as people are also subject to failure and corruption.
For example, you could make a system that has simultaneous redundant and different technologies, such as both electronic and paper trails. Then each of these subsystems could have their information flows be split at the source and channeled through completely different paths to different counters. There could be multiple sets of people with different political allegiances doing redundant counting. With this kind of system failures would be discovered, and could be tracked back to their sources. This kind of redundancy would cost more, but it could be done pretty straightforwardly if it is really what people wanted.
The main problem of course and it is the big one, is that it is not clear that the authorities actually WANT the system to be incorruptible. There are a huge number of power plays that go on in government, and the bigger the election, the more power is involved. There is so much back-room bargaining, lobbying, and cronyism, both within government and between government and big business, that the people in power don't really want transparency and fault-tolerance because it would interfere with their power. Fair voting only helps the little people, not the people who are already in power, and the system can only be changed by the people in power.