[ale] OT: Electronic Voting in GA

[Michael D. Hirsch]

On Saturday 19 October 2002 08:56 am, Irv Mullins wrote:

> Massive fraud, using the paper ballot system, requires a lot of
> operatives spread over a wide area, with many opportunities to be
> caught. Once computerized voting is in place, it takes only one
> programmer to throw the election. 

And that programmer doesn't even have to work on or break into the 
voting software.  If the voting software is on a closed source 
operating system, what is to keep someone from doing some obfuscated 
hackage to the OS code.  Say some code that does something like "in a 
group of radio buttons, if one with the word 'Democrat' is selected, 
show it as selected but 5% of the time don't return it as the selected 
button when the button group is queried.  Return some other button in 
the group instead."  

How would a hack like that ever be found?  It's not in the code that the 
software supplier gives to the auditors (if any)--they don't even have 
access to this code.

One big reason that any voting system needs to be open source from the 
ground up, not just the application but the OS and drivers, too.

--Michael

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