Another Day, Another Diebold Failure

The inability for Diebold, the Republican owned company of electronic voting machines, to create an easy to use and secure method of voting is beyond belief to comprehend. Once again, there is another leak to highlight the inability of the company to do anything right. How much this is incompetence and how much of it is intentional to help hijack elections is unknown. At this point, when they can't even do the basic, touch here to vote, correctly, there is really no other option available.

Out there you have companies, for a hell of a lot less money, using touch screen in business transactions every day of the week without incident, yet Diebold can't even do something that simple correctly. As for the security, its real simple. Have it so each machine counts the votes internally and does not report the results to a central database. Instead the total has to be claimed manually. Not as efficient but still quicker as only have to come up with a total from x number of machines that contain y votes. The machine should not allow for any kind of wireless connection, bluetooth or otherwise. Nor should the connections that allow for updating the firmware, downloading results etc but in a "hidden" location. They should be at the top of the machine or another high profile location so that if someone does try to hack the machine, the effort would be fairly obvious.

This would mean no easy external way to connect to the machine, so if someone wants to influence the election they would have to hack every machine individually rather then the central database, and most importantly, every single machine, whether required by law or not, should provide a paper trail. This paper trail should then be used for at least three election cycles to confirm the electronic count. Without exception, enforced by law. It can't be assumed the machines are secure, it can't be assume that they work correctly. It must be proved, over and over again.

If a company can't succeed at this, they simple shouldn't allow to exist. That is the nature of capitalism that Republicans love so much. Its time that same system be applied to Diebold instead of continuing to allow them to be protected by the corrupt and the ineffectual.