Defending Weak Electronic Voting Machines

Miscellaneous

from the hello-Mr.-Straw-Man dept

I’m still a bit confused why anyone would object to electronic voting machines having more security and more ways to prove they’re accurate, but everyone has their reasons. Unfortunately, this debate is turning into a political debate of Republicans vs. Democrats rather than a focus on the actual issues. That explains this latest editorial in defense of current electronic voting machines, which seems to paint the whole discussion as a Democratic plot to make democracy more expensive. The author does try to go through all the complaints, but starts off with a completely pointless argument to set the tone of his argument. He picks up the comment of a comedian about how the machines can be hacked over the internet and points out these machines are not hooked up to the internet. This makes it appear that the people who are really complaining about these machines have no idea what they’re talking about and think the machines are hooked up to the internet. The real complaints about the system being easily tampered with are brushed off by saying no one has ever been caught tampering with these machines. The simple response to that is that he forgot to add the word “yet” to the end (and that just because no one’s been caught doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened). He then brushes off the idea that tampering is a real problem anyway, since people could only tamper with one machine at a time, since (apparently) messing up a few votes is okay. As for the very unlikely possibility that anyone is tampering with the voting software to better favor one candidate, he says that random testing takes care of that. Random testing certainly helps – but as the California situation showed, the random testing was done incorrectly and uncertified software was loaded after machines had been “tested.” Furthermore, there’s simply no reason not to make voting machine software publicly open so that independent testers can go through the code and verify there’s nothing wrong with it. Finally, all the way at the end, he gets to the real complaint that most people have with these voting systems: that there’s no recountable paper trail. His response shows just how much he doesn’t understand the real issue. He says that each machine records the electronic votes multiple times, and the recount is easy: just view one of the other records. This leaves out the important middle step: knowing that any of those records actually recorded the vote properly. I can make a thousand identical copies of the same incorrect records and it doesn’t help me to verify the accuracy of the original vote. He claims that the only reason to add a paper trail is to make the machines more expensive – but it’s already been shown that the addition of such a paper trail adds a tiny cost to each machine (many of them already have paper printers included). Besides, at what point did anyone say democracy had to be cheap? Ignoring all the politics on either side concerning these voting machines, why would anyone not support making these machines more secure while also including some way to verify the accuracy of the vote? Most people arguing for better security don’t believe there’s some big plot to steal an election or that hackers are waiting to mess up the vote. We just don’t like the fact that it’s possible and would feel a lot better with a more secure system. What’s wrong with that?