Your challenge for the week

Dave, of Seeing the Forest, has a challenge for everyone.

Challenge - Prove That Voting Machines Accurately Record Votes

Suppose you could get every bug out of every program that runs every company's electronic voting machines. Suppose you can make sure that there is no way a technician has installed new chips the day before the election. Suppose you can absolutely guarantee that no hacker can get into the system. Suppose you can show me every line of the code from the machine AND prove to me that is the same code that is in every machine on election day. Suppose you find a way to assure me that every official, employee, etc. that comes into contact with any machine is not corrupt. Suppose that the disk drive and memory in the machine could be manufactured in a way that it never, ever dropped a bit. Suppose there were a way to safely transmit the results from every machine to the county's vote tabulator without possibility of error or compromise. And the suppose you can guarantee all of the SAME conditions for the country's vote tabulator machines.

When all of that is done there is still a problem. You still can not prove that the voting machine correctly recorded the way I voted. You can not prove this because there is no method for proving it -- no way to double check.

The challenge goes on with a number of other rhetorical questions which will probably be fairly obvious to anyone who has thought about this issue at all. He finishes with one question, however, which bears repeating.

Why would anyone think to make a machine that didn't provide a way to prove that the results are accurate in the first place? Why would a voting machine company think that there would be an election official anywhere who would not laugh them out of their office if they tried to sell such a machine? And why would a voting machine company actively resist the additional revenue they would receive from selling the printers?

And, finally, why would one political party's leadership actively resist efforts to provide voting machines that can be trusted?

This question is particularly poignant in my home state of New York these days. Our state faced a court ordered challenge to upgrade our voting machines with a three year window which is expiring this month or face the loss of significant federal funding for election purposes. Our dysfunctional legislature dithered and argued for more than two years before crashing into a "final study" this year. They were debating between an optical scanner system with paper ballots and a fully electronic, touch screen, "Diebold" type system. As you might have guessed, all of the obvious points brought up by Dave above not withstanding, they went with the Diebold machines.

I have so little faith in the system anymore that I wonder why I bother to vote. However, this is one of the most solidly blue states in the nation. If you suddenly see Hillary lose her Senate seat next fall, or some unknown, conservative Republican win Pataki's governor's seat, be prepared for an armed revolt in the streets.