Sadly that is probably the only way for the system to get changed. But the real tragedy is in order to prove that the system is flawed you have to commit what I can only assume is a huge felony and would there fore have to sacrifice your voting rights for ever.
Of course the elections are going to be hacked/rigged, that is the only explanation that there can be for such a non-redundant and holy system. You can not tell me that all the engineers at these companies can not come up with a better way to do the electronic voting. All they need to make it secure is a checks and balance system with a PAPER record.
My idea, machines loaded up with a read only version of the voting software, and generate a checksum. Print the check sum on all the voter cards. Voter inserts card into machine, machine verifies checksum. If checksum dose not match alarm goes off or something. If checksum matches then user is allowed to vote. They mark there choices, get a chance to review there options then submits there vote. Computer prints out users vote on to the paper card. Once card is printed then the vote is electronically stored. End of the night the votes and activity/security log is burned onto some read only media then taken to be electronically counted. At the same time the paper ballets are also counted as a check. This way you have the speed of the electronic voting plus the paper audit trail of the paper ballets.
As for the over all software, open source v. closed source each pose there own sets of risks and rewards. My though is closed source, only so people can not get information on it; however, it should be reviled by a team of security experts who are both republican, democrat and maybe even some of those other parties as well. Having a bipartisan team of experts review the code should make things more secure and less likely to be influenced by out side politics.
While no voting system is perfect, there are things you can do to make it safer. I am sure my way is far from perfect but, I do think it is better than what is out there currently. And the only conclusion that I can come up with to why these systems were designed with no checks and balances is because they were designed to be able to be rigged.
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Sadly that is probably the only way for the system to get changed. But the real tragedy is in order to prove that the system is flawed you have to commit what I can only assume is a huge felony and would there fore have to sacrifice your voting rights for ever.
Of course the elections are going to be hacked/rigged, that is the only explanation that there can be for such a non-redundant and holy system. You can not tell me that all the engineers at these companies can not come up with a better way to do the electronic voting. All they need to make it secure is a checks and balance system with a PAPER record.
My idea, machines loaded up with a read only version of the voting software, and generate a checksum. Print the check sum on all the voter cards. Voter inserts card into machine, machine verifies checksum. If checksum dose not match alarm goes off or something. If checksum matches then user is allowed to vote. They mark there choices, get a chance to review there options then submits there vote. Computer prints out users vote on to the paper card. Once card is printed then the vote is electronically stored. End of the night the votes and activity/security log is burned onto some read only media then taken to be electronically counted. At the same time the paper ballets are also counted as a check. This way you have the speed of the electronic voting plus the paper audit trail of the paper ballets.
As for the over all software, open source v. closed source each pose there own sets of risks and rewards. My though is closed source, only so people can not get information on it; however, it should be reviled by a team of security experts who are both republican, democrat and maybe even some of those other parties as well. Having a bipartisan team of experts review the code should make things more secure and less likely to be influenced by out side politics.
While no voting system is perfect, there are things you can do to make it safer. I am sure my way is far from perfect but, I do think it is better than what is out there currently. And the only conclusion that I can come up with to why these systems were designed with no checks and balances is because they were designed to be able to be rigged.