Honest Voting

It’s not as though I needed to sleep anyway.

The article How to steal an election by hacking the vote, by Jon Stokes, explains in seven acid pages “how one highly motivated and moderately skilled bad apple could cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to America’s private sector by unleashing a Windows virus from the safety of his parents’ basement.” Stokes reminds us that election security and information security have merged — and anyone who looks at the Risks Digest knows how cocked-up *that* is. Far too little has changed since the following was written in October 2006:

The problem is much deeper than most people realize. The standards are extremely weak (1990 and 2002 both), and VOLUNTARY. The systems are built to minimum standards rather than attempting to be meaningfully secure. The evaluations are commissioned and paid for by the vendors, and are proprietary. The entire voting process consists of weak links—registration, voter disenfranchisement, voter authentication, vote casting, vote recording, vote processing, resolution of disputes (which is essentially nonexistent in the unauditable paperless DREs), lack of audit trails, and so on. You cannot begin to enumerate the badness of the present situation.

Have a great weekend!

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