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from the rigged-in-not-the-peoples-favor dept.
With the U.S. presidential election just weeks away, questions about election security continue to dog the nation's voting system.
It's too late for election officials to make major improvements, "and there are no resources," said Joe Kiniry, a long-time election security researcher.
However, officials can take several steps for upcoming elections, security experts say.
"Nobody should ever imagine changing the voting technology used this close to a general election," said Douglas Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa. "The best time to buy new equipment would be in January after a general election, so you've got almost two years to learn how to use it."
- Stop using touchscreen electronic voting machines without printers
- Conduct more extensive pre-election voting machine tests
- Put better election auditing processes in place
- Hire hackers to test your systems
- Ensure that strong physical security is in place
Voters worried about vulnerable voting machines can rest easy--the fix is in!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 07 2016, @03:55AM
Whenever these electronic voting stories get posted people come out of the woodwork with cockamamie ideas for how to "fix" the problem.
All they ever do is prove that they don't have any idea what they are talking about.
The rule is very simple - paper ballots. You can (and should) put a well-designed computer on the front end to help users fill out the ballot and put a well-designed computer on the back-end to ensure accuracy and efficiency in counting the ballots. But in between it must be a clear, clean, human-readable (no qr-codes) paper ballot. There is no other option that satisifies the requirements of minimizing vote-tampering. Paper ballots don't eliminate vote-tampering, but they make it has ineffective as possible while still maintaining all the other features of a voting system that democracy depends on.