| Rath said: @mrstickball. My issues with electronic voting are with security. It's easier to tamper with votes and not get caught because all you need to do is flip a few bits and nobody is the wiser. While I'm sure the machines are secure for computers it would be very difficult to get a system that is actually secure enough. |
Not where we live.
Our machines are not simply electronic voting machines. They are a hybrid paper/electronic machine. Essentially, when you place a vote, the vote is recording in 3 areas:
- On the voting machine's hard drive
- On the voting machine's independent initialization device (essentially, I have an electronic key that starts the device for each person, which also records the vote of the last person)
- On a paper ballot each time the user presses a button on the touchscreen
So in the case of a hacker...Even if he could somehow tamper with the machine, the voting would begin to spin wildly on the paper ballot, alerting ANYONE in the room that someone had screwed with the device. During the election, we used our ears more than our eyes to alert us if any problems arose with the election - the machine has a very specific printing pattern when a person makes a vote, as well as finishes the vote, which publishes a massive bar code for that specific voter's choices. So again, if someone tampered with the machine (lets say he added 10 votes for Bush), the machine would print....10 times for Bush. That is something pretty noticable.
And having said that, paper is easily tampered with as well. It'd take just one corrupt counter to screw a lot more up.
Back from the dead, I'm afraid.
