Machine Politics

A study from Princeton University examined two Diebold voting machines--"the most widely deployed electronic voting platform in the United States."

The results--summarized in Taegan Goddard's Political Wire:

1. Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss. We have constructed demonstration software that carries out this vote-stealing attack.
2. Anyone who has physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory card that will later be inserted into a machine, can install said malicious software using a simple method that takes as little as one minute. In practice, poll workers and others often have unsupervised access to the machines.
3. AccuVote-TS machines are susceptible to voting-machine viruses -- computer viruses that can spread malicious software automatically and invisibly from machine to machine during normal pre-and post-election activity. We have constructed a demonstration virus that spreads in this way, installing our demonstration vote-stealing program on every machine it infects.
4. While some of these problems can be eliminated by improving Diebold's software, others cannot be remedied without replacing the machines' hardware. Changes to election procedures would also be required to ensure security.

Now, it's easy to see why Diebold would resist changes in its machines--they would cost money and, very likely, a loss of future business. But apart from politicians who are in the company's pocket, who would oppose correcting these faults, especially as they, or like defects, have been reported over and over and over? Only two answers come to mind: those who are stupid, and those who actually intend to steal votes.

I do NOT mean to suggest that preventing corruption is the only, or even the main reason for demanding drastic improvement in electronic voting. Any fair-minded, reasonably honest person must recognize that the defects in electronic voting can come from simple sources that have nothing to do with corruption: software mistakes, manufacturing errors, static electricity, etc. We want voting machines to be accurate and verifiable not merely to avoid fraud, but because democracy deserves precise vote counting. That does not derive from a suspicion of fraud, but from a belief that democracy is the best form of government, and that sloppy vote totals are undemocratic. Anyone disagree?

(Given the Republican devotion to measures argued to diminish the chances of election fraud--such as requiring voters to use government-approved IDs in order to vote--it becomes harder and harder to believe that the GOPs opposition to fixing the well-documented faults in electronic voting machines is not based on anything other than an intent to cheat.)