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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: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 11 2019, @01:03PM (2 children)
If you have a paper system, there will be forgery, destruction of votes, and all the business as usual chicanery we've had for hundreds of years - along with the barely acceptable controls we've devised for them.
If you move to a full electronic system, you might bluff that there's anonymity because the system is "so complex that nobody could ever figure it out," but, in reality, just like cryptocurrency, if you've effectively protected against double voting, you've also eliminated anonymity for the voters from the auditors who can determine if there has been double voting or not.
The problem with electronic systems is that nobody trusts them... with today's tech, we could literally photograph and time/location stamp every voter along with their authority to vote - boil that down to a hash code, and attach all votes to hash codes in a public ledger. The trick is: who gets copies of the non-anonymous data in order to perform audits? The voter could take away a copy of their hash and check the ledger to be assured that their vote has been counted, but who do they trust to guard against fake votes? Whoever that is, no matter how convoluted you make the system, if they can really check the vote tally for authenticity of each vote, they can also unmask how people voted.
Electronic can definitely be developed to a "better" system than paper, but only once people trust it. Photos and unique hash codes might be a first step toward that trust, but compartmentalizing the information in a way that it isn't abused is a human problem: checks and balances, giving opposing forces partial information sufficient that they can reach consensus without either side having the whole picture.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 11 2019, @03:00PM (1 child)
A system with paper receipts is supposed to have 2 copies, one for the officials and one for the voters precisely so that this kind of thing doesn't happen.
But, really, the correct solution is to not use voting machines, instead use paper ballots with optical scanners. We've been using those for years here and there haven't been any problems. You can even go watch the votes being counted if you want to. It turns out that after all the GOP accusations of elections fraud that there weren't any changes even after rebuilding the building that the votes are counted to allow people to watch from any side of the room they want to.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 12 2019, @02:19AM
And votes are never lost... absentee ballots are never "misplaced" and uncounted. And the voters themselves turn out in great numbers to ensure that their votes are properly represented in recounts... sure.
there were slightly more cases of GOP voting fraud than non-GOP voting fraud.
🌻🌻 [google.com]