Electronic Voting Machine Shown To Mis-Record Votes
from the scary dept
One of the silly arguments of those defening poorly designed electronic voting machines is that there's never been any evidence that they miscount votes. Well, there goes that argument. Found over at Freedom to Tinker is news of some research done on electronic voting machines used in Florida elections that clearly show the machine's voting image and the audit logs do not match, which could lead to votes being lost or not counted properly. What's scary about this is that the report noting these problems was written a year ago and, even those these problems were known, the machines were still used and the same problems occurred again. As always, the local election supervisor claims that, even though they know about this problem, it's no big deal. She claims that the only problem is with the audit system - and not the vote tabulation. Of course, if the audit system doesn't match the vote tabulation there's no way to know that the vote tabulation actually works properly. Even worse, the "workaround" the supervisor came up with was basically to use uncertified software. What's wrong with a paper trail again?
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Florida, AGAIN?
Hanging and pregnant chads, now electronicallly...
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I may be dense...
...but I just don't get all this hoopla surrounding electronic voting mechanisms. I've been in the Point of Sale business for over 20 years, and have designed and installed thousands of systems in countries that require the use of a "fiscal" printer. A fiscal printer is basically a government-mandated (and controlled) device that essentially records every single keystroke made on the POS to ensure that the totals being rung into and by the POS match the paper audit trail. These devices serve as a taxing-audit mechanism mostly. While software bugs to appear, each and every fiscal printer/POS device has to pass rigourous in-country testing to ensure a no-error condition prior to deployment. Thereafter, the machines are audited quarterly to prove that no errors existed.
Why are voting machines so bloody different? I deploy this kind of tech into thousands of burger joints worldwide for about $2000 per machine....isn't this good enough?
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