UNINNOVATE / Engineering At Its Finest

Imagine the following computer program:

1. Display a picture of a cat and a dog
2. Allow user to pick which animal is his or her favorite
3. Record the choice
4. Print out a paper record of the choice

Anyone with minimal computer programming experience should be able to write such a program. A team of experienced programmers should have absolutely no problem writing, testing, and deploying such a program in a matter of days. Any legitimate software company would have no problem allowing outside security corporations to review such a program because the program would be considered completely trivial. There should be no room for error in such a simple problem.

Yet, in the United States, the simple problem of recording votes with computers has been fraught with bias, secrecy, inconsistency and incompetence. This problem is not limited to a political party or select jurisdiction. Reseachers from several universities have identified glaring holes in several types of voting machines. Given the state of computer science and standard software industry practices in comparable industries such as banking, there is absolutely no excuse for these problems. These are problems that have been solved many times over.

HBO has produced a documentary entitled “Hacking Democracy” that chronicles some of the major problems with electronic voting machines over the last two years. The final segment of the documentary shows actual voting machines in government-controlled conditions altering votes without any record that the votes were altered. At that point, the machines may as well be spitting out random numbers for vote totals because the results are completely worthless.

The entire documentary has been posted on Google Video and is embedded below:

If these were ATM machines being sold to banks, the quality and security of these machines would have resulted in lawsuits, investigations, and firings many times over. Unfortunately, the public sector lags behind the private sector in technology and has shown that it does not have the resources or expertise to certify voting machines as being secure. With so much at risk, jurisdictions nationwide and worldwide need to reject any machine outright that is not fully open and available for researchers to inspect. Any company that is afraid of allowing this does not deserve the public’s trust as a partner in maintaining a democracy.