In the a little late category, Scarborough Country discussed the overall dislike that Republicans have for paper trails in the electronic age of voting. Oddly the panel all agreed its a problem, which begs the question of why nothing is being done about it. Even my own state has no paper trail so a "recount" doesn't really exist as there is nothing to recount nor anything to verify that the machine count is accurate.
The entire voting process as it stands is own faith alone. Faith in the hardware, faith in the programming, faith in the process of handling the date, faith in the poll workers, faith in the lack of corruption of anyone involved. Thanks to the lack of oversight, lack of a trail, thanks to the electronic age, all it takes is one person to change the election and void the voice of the people.
A voting machine is really broken into two parts. Accepting and counting the vote, and security of that vote. The first is a trivial exercise that should easily use programming technology and hardware that has been around for quite awhile, up to the point that its used in Tablet PCs for the consumer to use to take notes, draw pictures and generally do very complicated functions beyond anything needed from a voting machine.
The second part, security is difficult, but not insurmountable. For security, use whets already working. Banking, credit card companies etc already use encryption with a great deal success on the internet, there is no reason why this same encryption of data can't be used for these machines to secure the data.
The machines themselves should not allow wireless access, but should allow wired access but only after certain processes and security is setup. The NIC card and access should be locked, literally under lock and key and that access should be in a very obvious place such as the back of the machine or top monitor panel so that any attempt to tamper with it obvious to all.
Anything done on that machines, no matter how small should be logged. The log file itself should be so complete that itself would be a history of what was done, when and where for the life of the machine and almost be used as a form of voting recount of its own. All changes to the machines should invoke the buddy system, where the buddies are qualified but random to reduce the changes of corruption.
A potential final version of machines used for the elections should be made to the public to test, hack and generally break to show flaws and problems so they can be corrected in time for the election. Testing should be arduous, public and go beyond the lab testing that doesn't take in account real world issues and use.
A final step is verification of the count. This should be done in several ways. One a paper trail should be available for every vote. Two, the log file would be a second source of verification. In every state, for every district, there should be random recounts of the entire vote. By random that means truly, locations in a hat, pull out the name, that place will do a manual recount. This should be done at three locations across the state. If the paper trail count doesn't match electronic count of 2 out of 3 locations, then a statewide recount should be performed. This random testing and verification forces the machine designers to build in security, to ensure the devices work properly and it discourages tampering since it would prevent anyone from knowing what location would be test and when. This last step, however implemented, would be critical to any oversight as long as a large degree of random is in the process so no one can predict what locations will perform a recount and what locations will not.
No process will be fool-proof, but any process is better then what we have now, which is to base our entire voting process on faith alone.
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