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Voting machine maker ES&S has said it “will no longer sell” paperless voting machines as the primary device for casting ballots in a jurisdiction.
ES&S chief executive Tom Burt confirmed the news in an op-ed.
TechCrunch understands the decision was made around the time that four senior Democratic lawmakers demanded to know why ES&S, and two other major voting machine makers, were still selling decade-old machines known to contain security flaws.
Burt’s op-ed said voting machines “must have physical paper records of votes” to prevent mistakes or tampering that could lead to improperly cast votes. Sen. Ron Wyden introduced a bill a year ago that would mandate voter-verified paper ballots for all election machines.
The chief executive also called on Congress to pass legislation mandating a stronger election machine testing program.
Burt’s remarks are a sharp turnaround from the company’s position just a year ago, in which the election systems maker drew ire from the security community for denouncing vulnerabilities found by hackers at the annual Defcon conference.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/09/voting-machine-maker-election-security/
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday June 11 2019, @12:07PM (1 child)
Bev Harris of Black Box Voting was able to download the Diebold Election Systems software about 15 years ago, and noticed a bunch of things. Most notably, there was a different code branch created for the equipment certification than was being installed for the election itself.
More recently, she wrote a series of articles on how vote counts are stored as floating-point numbers [blackboxvoting.org] for no legitimate reason whatsoever, and describes the tools available in one of the most popular voting systems in the US for election officials to skew results in a way that seems believable enough that those saying that there was a problem can be safely dismissed as conspiracy theorist nutjobs. Never mind that in numerous US elections as of late the results have been substantially different than the exit polls, conveniently in the direction favored by the election officials in the district in question, in precincts where this particular voting system is in use.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 11 2019, @05:45PM
floats? that's hilarious. how else can you add .05% to a vote. lol