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from the newer-is-not-necessarily-better dept.
The Intercept reports
The nation's secretaries of state gathered for a multi-day National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) conference in Washington, D.C., this weekend, with cybersecurity on the mind.
Panels and lectures centered around the integrity of America's election process, with the federal probe into alleged Russian government attempts to penetrate voting systems a frequent topic of discussion.
[...] One way to allay concerns about the integrity of electronic voting machine infrastructure, however, is to simply not use it. Over the past year, a number of states are moving back towards the use of paper ballots or at least requiring a paper trail of votes cast.
For instance, Pennsylvania just moved to require all voting systems to keep a paper record of votes cast. Prior to last year's elections in Virginia, the commonwealth's board of elections voted to decertify paperless voting machines--voters statewide instead voted the old-fashioned way, with paper ballots.
[...] Oregon is one of two states in the country to require its residents to vote by mail, a system that was established via referendum in 1998. [Oregon Secretary of State Dennis] Richardson argued that this old-fashioned system offers some of the best defense there is against cyber interference.
"We're using paper and we're never involved with the Internet. The Internet is not involved at all until there's an announcement by each of our 36 counties to [the capital] Salem of what the results are and then that's done orally and through a confirmation e-mail and the county clerks in each of the counties are very careful to ensure that the numbers that actually are posted are the ones that they have," he said. "Oregon's in a pretty unique situation."
[...] In New Hampshire, the state uses a hybrid system that includes both paper ballots and machines that electronically count paper ballots with a paper trail.
Karen Ladd, the assistant secretary of state for New Hampshire, touted the merits of the system to The Intercept. "We do a lot of recounts, and you can only have a recount with a paper ballot. You can't do a recount with a machine!" she said.
America's paper ballot states may seem antiquated to some, but our neighbors to the north have used paper ballots for federal elections for their entire history. Thanks to an army of officials at 25,000 election stations, the integrity of Canada's elections is never in doubt.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jimtheowl on Tuesday February 20 2018, @09:12AM (2 children)
A copy instruction is not some random operation that happens out of the control of the programmer. If you want a 'deep copy' it is so. If the program is using a database, as it should for this type of implementation, it is expected from the database engine does implement these operations correctly. It is what it is meant to do. Otherwise, not only voting machines, but banking operations would equally be affected.
The issue is that the vendors are without oversight. They can cash in on both the sale of the machine and their result. Assuming they would resist temptation for the latter, they would apparently be justified to hide any breaches because of their legal obligation to shareholders for the sake of the bottom line.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 20 2018, @09:55AM
If my bank makes many copies of the money on my account, I won't object as long as those copies end up also being on my account. ;-)
(Score: 1) by Veyrdite on Tuesday February 20 2018, @09:00PM
> Computers do not 'understand' anything in the first place. It is all about how you program it.
Yes, I probably wrote this the wrong way around. Perhaps the understanding problem relies between the programmer and the computer: the programmer believes the computer understands instructions in a certain way, but in practice copies of data get left around the place and sometimes accidentally used.
> I am not sure where this quote comes from
Self. Didn't twig to me that the CSS for blockquotes here makes them look like quoting other users whilst I was previewing. FTP; LTL; apologies.
> Otherwise, not only voting machines, but banking operations would equally be affected.
My understanding is that banking systems have problems all of the time. Luckily money isn't like votes: it's (mostly) not anonymous, so people notice when it goes missing or does something strange.