Slashdot recently posted an article about those wonderful Diebold voting machines. The article essentially tells you how to remove the memory card on which all the votes are stored without leaving any evidence of tampering. In other words, it gives you most of what you need to change the results of an election.
The more I think about how completely inept one has to be to build one of these machines in such a fraud-happy manner the more mad I get. Voting is the only way we can exercise control over our government. It is our only tool to fight oppression. For these machines to be approved for use is a direct threat to our democracy. We no longer have the option of using force to remove a government from power. Your rifle won't do much against their Joint Strike Fighter.
The only reason I don't see this as being malicious is because of how easy it is. If I were going to rig elections I would want to make sure it wasn't completely obvious how I accomplished it.
In my opinion, Diebold should be held legally responsible for these machines. There should be criminal negligence prosecutions. Their incompetence in building these machines amounts to nothing less than treason.
This particular hack is just one of many problems these machines have. The fact that there is no paper trail absolutely baffles me. If an ATM machine can reliably track transactions and give receipts for these transactions, why can't a voting machine? As a software engineer I understand the technical difficulties involved in reliable transaction management, but these problems have long since been solved.
These are countless, reliable ways to make sure that one vote equals one vote. It would be trivial to dispense a cryptographically unique receipt to the voter so they can prove who they voted for. It would be equally trivial to keep a paper-based receipt in the machine as well. These receipts could even be machine-readable to aid in auditing.
What's most confusing, however, is why we are using these machines to begin with. I can see that they would dramatically decrease the time it takes to tally election results. I can even see an argument that it's easier to make sure the voter understands their decision by allowing for more refined user interfaces.
But I don't think we should make voting easy. I'm not for mandatory tests or anything that unconstitutional, but I am for make sure people aren't making a casual choice in a decision that is one of the most important things a citizen of the United States can do. I'm all for 5 hour lines to vote. The longer the line, the better. It weeds out the people who don't care. I'm all for voting between 2am and 8am. Nothing would keep the idiots from the voting booth more than having to get up before the crack of dawn.
I certainly believe that everybody who wants to vote should be able to, but you should really want to vote. Let's do whatever we can to prevent people from voting for a familiar name instead of making a conscientious decision about their leaders.
