This guy’s a researcher and they’re old machines (which are still in use all over), but what if a political operative got a hold of them? Knowledge is power to a political operative looking to help their guy win.
For a mere $82 a computer scientist and electronic voting critic managed to purchase five $5,000 Sequoia electronic voting machines over the internet last month from a government auction site. And now he’s taking them apart.
Princeton computer science professor Andrew Appel and his students have begun reverse-engineering the software embedded in the machines’ ROM chips to determine if it has any security holes. But Appel says the ease with which he and his students opened the machines and removed the chips already demonstrates that the voting machines are vulnerable to unauthorized modification.
Their analysis appears to mark the first time that someone who hasn’t signed a non-disclosure agreement with Sequoia Voting Systems has examined one of its machine’s internals.
“There are hundreds of counties in the country that have had these machines for 20 years,” Appel says. “To assume that nobody could have ever had access to those machines to fool around with them in the last 20 years … that’s a stretch. And now it’s certainly not true.”
A paper trail by itself is not good enough. If the printer jambs, the trail is useless. No system to count millions of votes will ever be perfect, but optical scanned paper ballots are substantially better. Optically scanned voter marked paper ballots can be verified by a hand count with many observers watching the procedure.
We know how to count and safeguard paper. Nighttime cash deposits in a bank are counted by two tellers, a manager and two cameras recording the count. Not perfect, but pretty damn good.
A scanner is not a voting machine, it is a tabulating device. If it breaks down another scanner can be used, or the count can be done by hand. A direct reading voting machine is a black box with proprietary code that the vendors call “a trade secrete”. There is no way to tell what the wizard behind the curtain is up to?
The sanctity of voting is too great to be left in doubt. I don’t know which system is the best, but I do know it should be transparent, open to scrutiny, and verifiable.