[ale] Its over. Maybe

[Mike Panetta]

Except by nature punch cards are WORM media.  Flash cards are not.

Who is to say the votes could not be changed between the machine that
"writes" the card and the machine that "reads" them? 

Now I know what your gonna say, thats not a flaw of the machines.  I say it is,
if they were done correctly the data on the card would be encrypted with a key 
that only existed on the reader and the writer (or some better scheme, I am
no security expert).

The ultimate machine would have a voter verified paper trail AND cheap WORM
media...

Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Popovitch <jimpop at yahoo.com>
Sent: Nov 3, 2004 10:05 PM
To: ALE <ale at ale.org>
Subject: Re: [ale] Its over. Maybe

On Wed, 2004-11-03 at 21:25 -0500, Jeff Hubbs wrote:

> on one hand you have a computer that is used to determine how much fuel
> to shoot into a car engine's cylinders and the other you have a massive
> system of computers whose combined output is used to decide who the 
> President of the United States is? 

That's a long stretch.  You are equating the Diebold machines to the
Borg.  Hardly.  Each Diebold machine is independent and just dumps out a
simple set of metrics.  They are NOT networked together and, as I
understand it, based on my experience yesterday, only record your vote
on a memory-card to be read elsewhere.  By concept it is no different
then a paper card reader, other than hanging-chads are not allowed in
binary. ;)

-Jim P.

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