Florida Voting Machines Still Flawed

According to a government ordered study obtained by the AP Tuesday, optical voting machines in Florida are still flawed despite efforts to fix them.

Theoretically, someone with only brief access to the machines could swap out the memory card with a preprogrammed one allowing one candidate's votes to count towards another. In other words, it would switch up the vote making the loser actually win the precinct. A successful "attack" in this manner assumes there are infrequent paper audits.

Diebold Election Systems, the company of the machines in question, stated they would address the problem before next year's primary election.

Currently, swapping memory cards is not a matter of walking up to the machine and popping it out. Only a few people have keys to access them. Even then, screws must be removed and a seal broken before the card can be replaced.

Some bloggers see this situation as the continuing demise of our current voting system and call out for change. Badtux the Snarky Penguin:

So how do we get out of this situation? Well, first we need national standards. Real national standards, that require voting machines to meet the same accounting standards when accounting for votes that their business counterparts are required to meet when accounting for dollars. I don't care if the dimwit Registrar of Voters in Palm Beach County makes the decision to buy a particular machine, as long as the machine is guaranteed to work properly via some national body that has full authority to audit the thing. Secondly, we need to educate local voter registrars that just because it's a computer doesn't make it great. You'd think that anybody who had regularly experienced the Blue Screen of Death under Windows would have been cured of the notion that technology is necessarily a good thing, but a lot of these people still think technology is magic, not a bunch of cranky machines that humans programmed and often mis-programmed that do stupid things like, say, crash and lose votes, which is why you need that paper trail. And finally we need more folks like in Florida and California who are willing to stand up to powerful forces and say "We aren't gonna buy stuff that doesn't meet our standards, and if your stuff doesn't meet our standards, you either fix it or you're out of here."

Greg of Rhymes with Right doesn't seem to have much of a solution but asks all the right questions:

So, what is the solution? Do we rely on these new technologies, despite the flaws? Do we return to the punch cards, which had a relatively low error rate and are relatively easy to use? Or do we go back to hand-counted paper ballots, eschewing the technological fixes but introducing the element of human error?

No system is perfect, no system is fraud-proof, and no system will satisfy everyone. The question therefore becomes "which one will be seen as conferring the greatest legitimacy on the results?"

-Dippold

Political Online Reputation