E-voting given go-ahead despite flaws [New Scientist]
Great. The organization that was supposed to vet the new electronic voting machines from Diebold says that they still have problems and things need to be fixed before moving on. This does not prevent the Governor of Maryland to give them his blessing. he press flack stated 'We are convinced that in the right environment these can be some of the most secure machines in the nation.' Being a cynic on these sorts of things, I wonder how much Diebold donated to his campaign? We are supposed to be able to read the report, redacted of course to prevent material from falling into the hand's of hackers, at the governor's website by Friday.
[The report can now be downloaded.]
You can read the press release right now. My jaw dropped when reading the new things Diebold was adding ONLY BECAUSE AN INDEPENDENT AUDIT WAS LAUNCHED. 'incorporating encryption into the electronic transmission of election results'. What, were the transmission of election results going to be in plain text? 'providing personal identification numbers for when election officials access the system'. I think accessing an election system should be at least as difficult as accessing an ATM. Read the other things that the state wants done. Almost everyone of them is something a reasonable person would expect to have already been done. Encryption of vote tallies. Require 100% verification of unofficial tallies. Provide a process for followinwg tally audit trails. My favorite is the last thing that the state required before approving the system. 'Change default passwords and passwords printed in documentation.'!!!! Great. Diebold did not think of that before and had to have a state request it after an independent audit. Whay will happen to the election process when it is controlled by a few proprietary systems whose inner working are closed to the very public using them? What little we know about this system came about becuase they mistakenly leaked a version of the software on the net. Why should we really believe that a company that has to be told to encrypt this information really has a clue about doint it right? Will they be the MS of elections, fixing each voting fault with a patch? The entire democratic process breaks down if we can not trust the machines that tally the vote. Human error is one thing. Manipulation of the results by software is another. 11:34:13 PM 
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