Slashdot Mirror
The Computer Scientist Who Prefers Voting With Paper (theatlantic.com)
Geoffrey.landis writes: The Atlantic profiles a computer scientist: Barbara Simons, who has been on the forefront of the pushback against electronic voting as a technology susceptible to fraud and hacking. When she first started writing articles about the dangers of electronic voting with no paper trail, the idea that software could be manipulated to rig elections was considered a fringe preoccupation; but Russia's efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election have reversed Simons's fortunes. According to the Department of Homeland Security, those efforts included attempts to meddle with the electoral process in 21 states; while a series of highly publicized hacks -- at Sony, Equifax, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management -- has driven home the reality that very few computerized systems are truly secure. Simons is a former President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM); and the group she helps run, Verified Voting, has been active in educating the public about the dangers of unverified voting since 2003.
It's way too easy for someone to sneak in an extra box of fake ballots to rig an election.
It's hard to rig an election with a single box of fake ballots. It's also hard to bring in thousands of boxes without anybody noticing.
One of the requirements for a proper voting system is that ordinary people can understand it and oversee its correct implementation, so that they don't need to take someone else's word for it. Computers are basically out by definition.
The sad part is that it's not only security experts who should be saying this. Voting should not only be accurate, but that accuracy needs to be verifiable by laymen, and they should be able to understand the end-of-end process to tally and verify the count. Voting by computer violates that principle on a fundamental level.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
There are plenty of instances of tampering with paper ballots. Can you provide a single instance of an electronic voting machine actually being tampered with during an election?
You've summarized the problem. Electronic voting allows for undetectable manipulation.