Four-Eight-Four [dot org]

According to the Baltimore Sun (”Security of ballot not 100%“), the State of Maryland plans to retire its electronic voting machines and move back to scanning paper ballots by 2010, a full four years before it finishes paying the bill for the electronic machines it is retiring.

I’m thrilled to see a state moving in this direction. I have worked with computers for years, and been exposed to them since 1979 (or maybe 1980) when my father brought home an Atari 800, and my experience is enough to make me more than just slightly uncomfortable with the idea of electronic voting machines.

It’s not really the computer part of the voting machines that makes me uncomfortable, though we’ve seen issues with core components themselves, such as the famous (at least in the geeky circles I run in) Pentium FTV bug that caused the CPU to have trouble doing certain floating point division operations.

What really concerns me is the people that program the voting machines as well as the people who are in charge of running them. Quite frankly, I simply don’t trust everybody to not try to do things to alter the results of an election … and considering that vote fraud wasn’t unheard of even in the days before electronic voting, it’s not a stretch to imagine that people would try to manipulate the results of an election electronically.

The main issue, in my book, is that electronic voting machines make it easier for a single person to alter the vote, and the results of such an alteration can potentially be far worse than has been previously possible with paper ballots.

If you don’t think it could happen with electronic voting machines, watch this video which features a Clint Curtis, computer programmer, testifying in court about how easy it would be to alter the results of an election:

Yes, he could be lying, but remember … he testified under oath that the Speaker of the House of Florida asked him to write a program that would rig an election.

If that doesn’t concern you, maybe this video, recorded by three Princeton computer scientists, will:

In case you didn’t watch the video, after showing the machine give an incorrect vote, the narrator says

When the election ends, the vote-stealing software can delete itself from the voting machine. No evidence remains that the machine was ever hijacked. No evidence remains that any votes were stolen. As far as anyone can tell, the election was conducted fairly … but the result is fraudulent.

…

Anyone who has access to a voting machine for a few minutes can install malicious code.

Concerned yet?

I think I want to cast my votes in Maryland.