Since the US is big on outsourcing, maybe the US should outsource electronic voting machines from India.

They have electronic voting but unlike the US, they haven’t had problems with insecure systems or questionable results.

And when I said “idiotic”, I used it as I would for “ludicrous” or “mind boggling”, not “stupid”.

He described how easy it was, and assured that judge that his program could alter just about any election in the country that uses computers to count votes. Very confident, he was!

Do you still feel safe?

Having spent quite a bit of time helping with and/or reporting on a contentious and very important recount, I maintain that computer assisted voting has value and is not idiotic.

Most democracies have parliamentary systems where the government is elected and takes office within a week of the election. That means within only a few days:

(a) the country votes,
(b) the votes are counted,
(c) the votes are recounted, and
(d) the government is sworn in.

Some countries have multi-stage elections that run over days or weeks. Many countries have huge numbers of voters over large geographic areas, just as the US does – Canada, Japan, Brazil, Russia, Australia, etc. And this all happens with paper ballots – ballots marked with an X, using a pencil. To see “electronic or butterfly ballot” as the only options requires swallowing a lot of koolaid.

The US, for some idiotic reason, sees a need to have instant results, final totals within five minutes of the polls closing. This is mindbogglingly stupid considering there are two months between the election and swearing in of government.

Are Americans so impatient, so unwilling to take one or two weeks and have accurate counts that they’d give up having a real democracy or give up electing the person with the most votes? If voting is such a hardship to you and instant results that important, give up democracy and become a plutocratic theocracy. You’re already halfway there.

But as usual, the US doesn’t want to listen to how things work just fine in the rest of the world, instead it “has to be done the ‘Murrican way!” Who says the US is nothing like North Korea with its “juche” attitude?

There were three company reps, a laptop, and the county clerk present in the vote counting room. When each voting station closed, the head person brought a handful of USB memory sticks to the counting room. These were plugged into the laptop and votes added up.

I asked what kind of encryption was used by the machines and memory sticks. No one, not any of the company reps could tell me. They didn’t even say it was confidential, they said “I don’t know.” Now, they may not have known, but you’d think encryption would be a big deal for something like this.

I asked them what would happen in the case of a recount. They said that the USB memory sticks would be scanned again. No paper trail at all, anywhere.

Given that many (not all, but many) encryption schemes are relatively easy to attack (especially given that the content of the drives are known (names of candidates or numbers)), I have serious concerns about these voting systems.

I would much prefer, as you say, anything with a paper record. I’d like a voting machine that printed a two part record, one part given to the voter and one part dumped into a locked bin underneath the machine.

Recounts should be using a different system than the original count. It’s just robust. It’s not cheap though.

I’d rather vote online using SSL than using an electronic voting machine.