Cross posted from Today in Brief.
Ars Technica has a chilling summary of the current problems with electronic voting.
As the article states, even if we assume there is no willful tampering being done with these electronic voting machines, we’re in for a terribly shitty midterm election in those states/precincts using the machines. Poll workers are poorly trained, procedures for making sure the correct votes are recorded and counted are not in place, the machines can easily and undetectably tampered with, there is no dependable audit trail.
Electronic voting is not a panacea for the problems we saw in 2000. Voting problems are addressed with procedure, including auditing (paper trails) and vote verification (preferably at the polling place AND after you’ve gone home). As we see in too many places these days the focus of current voting system work is on presenting a facade to make it appear that our votes are secure and will be counted correctly. Unfortunately it seems that, in many places, that facade will break down when it is least convenient for the electorate.
A side note: the eminent cryptographer Ron Rivest proposed a damned good verifiable voting system, the best part of which is that it uses no fancy math and no computers to cast the votes. Read the paper, as much as you can, it’s an incredibly simple scheme that would work very well.